The Ring Two

I thought Verbinksi's American Ring was way better than Hideo Nakata's original Japanese version, Ringu. Nakata, well, he's just not very good. He makes dull, dreary, uninteresting movies that happen to have great premises.

His original Ringu had a solid concept, and it was an okay movie, but it just kind of plodded along, without building much momentum. The imagery was there - washed-out visuals, creepy undead wet girl, black oily water, deadpan dialogue, nondescript urban settings - but the narrative was dead in the water. Which brings us to his Japanese follow-up, Dark Water (remade earlier this year with Jennifer Connelly). The movie was not only intensely similar to Ringu, but even less interesting, another waste of a solid set-up.



Now Nakata has come to America, and it's just getting worse and worse...The script for Ring Two was written by Ehren Krueger, who wrote the first American Ring, and it's loosely based on the Japanese Ringu sequels. Anyway, it's totally nonsensically bad. It takes one of the main assets of the first film - the strong central concept of a video tape that causes death a week after it's viewed - and ditches it in favor of some lame child-possession plot line.

In the first act of the new film, Rachel (Naomi Watts), the plucky reporter who first discovered the secret of the deadly video tape, destroys the only known copy, thus ending the evil ghost Samara's reign of terror.

Why shoot yourself in the foot like that? For the next hour or so, the film essentially has no story at all, nowhere to go. Ghostly things continue happening to Rachel and her oddball, quiet son Aidan (David Dorfman) for no reason. Cause the tape is destroyed, right? So the ghost has no power, right?

We know eventually all will be explained, but the whole affair seems rather pointless. If the ghost isn't imprisoned in the tape, if she can fly all around haunting whomever she pleases, whether or not they've even watched her little home movie, then there are no rules, no objectives, no conflict. You've got a story that makes no sense.

Eventually, we find out that the undead Samara wants to invade the body of young Adian and live on with Rachel as her mommy. Uh-huh...If she could possess people, why hasn't she been doing that all along? And why would she want Rachel for her mommy if Rachel just keeps trying to kill her? And if you had this kind of power over time and space, would you really use it to spook horny teenagers, precocious 8 year olds and their attractive, fragile and emotionally distant single mothers?

So, the set-up is fuck-all. Nakata is left with are a bunch of scenarios that play like a best-of of the first movie, recreations of the original Ring's best moments.

While the first movie had an intense encounter with a crazed horse on a ferry, this new movie has a ludicrous and poorly-handled sequence in which a large group of deer attack Rachel's car. (It's even sillier than it sounds, and the CG deer effects are atrocious).

While the first movie had an informational encounter with Samara's crazed father (Brian Cox), the new movie has an informational encounter with Samara's crazed mother (Sissy Spacek).

While the first movie had a bland boyfriend killed off in the film's only gruesome sequence...well, you get the idea.

But let's face it...what's enjoyable about Gore Verbinski's original film isn't the crackerjack plotting. It's the style. The movie is unsettling (if not actually scary). It's aided by crisp blue-black cinemtography, tight plotting, a coolly efficient performance from Naomi Watts and a genuinely surprising late-in-the-film twist.

Ring Two is a film lacking style. By the half-hour point, the film has become so ridiculous that it never again gets close to being at all chilling. Almost all of the attempts at scare scenes, in fact, rely on poor computer effects, including an odd sequence in which bathtub water defies gravity to rest against the ceiling. The technology, regrettably, isn't quite up to the task, and the result is a garbled and ill-defined liquidy mass. Not scary.

Nakata right now is publicly vying for the chance to try again with Ring Three. I think his sequel has pretty much killed the series, honestly. If they are going to try and keep this think afloat (har!), some poor screenwriter's going to have to work overtime to make anything work with this hackneyed mythology. Best of luck, DreamWorks...