Some days, it feels like the superhero movie has cornered a solid monopoly on the old “genre-flip-and-reverse” approach to innovations in their sequels. Just last week, we all saw (or, frankly, not enough of you saw) David Ayer’s stale and stolid Suicide Squad set-up get transformed into a $100 million Troma tribute that perhaps deserved more distinction than the addition of a “The” to the title. But very rarely in recent years has the best use of the format – the face-turn from horror movie ”villain” to action movie hero – come close to equaling the highs of, say, Terminator 2: Judgement Day or Rambo: First Blood Part II (I wonder what connects them?). Comparing Rodo Sayagues’ Don’t Breathe 2 to either of those movies is, of course, a stretch — it’s a small-budget sequel meant to cash in on fond memories of the one-hit-one-gimmick Fede Alverez-directed horror film a few years ago, rather than the big-and-broad action classics emulated there — but what it lacks in spectacle it makes up for in morally repugnant meanness and audacity. It is so bleak, so morally unforgiving, that a mere description of its black-hearted plot could suffice as the answer to “Lie Bot, what is the saddest thing?”
Don’t Breathe 2 lacks all of the grace of its predecessor, with few of the floating pans through floors and crawl spaces and the precision of its suspenseful direction, but it more than makes up for it by providing the kind of bad taste entertainment that will horrify many morally-minded people and deeply endear it to the kind of modern moviegoer who would have formerly attended chophouses specifically for films like this, glimpses of unique exploitation thrills from the likes of Bill Lustig or Danny Steinmann or Katt Shea.
In case you’ve forgotten, the Don’t Breathe franchise is centered around an aged and bad-ass vet, played by Stephen Lang, who doesn’t let his blindness prevent him from fucking up home invaders. In the last film, he was a nearly supernatural slasher who kept women imprisoned in his basement, forcing them to bear replacements for his daughter that was killed in a car accident some years before. I have taken to calling him The Turkey Bastard, given his penchant for using a turkey baster in the process, after trying to imagine what cute moniker the New York Post might have given him (and believe me, there are plenty worse names to describe real-world crimes in the tabloids, so I don’t feel so bad for the joke). Eight years after that event, however, the Turkey Bastard has somehow got himself a tween daughter (Madelyn Grace), whom he keeps isolated from the outside world aside from her occasional visits into town with an army vet that the Turkey Bastard trusts. He raises her much like your average lone-wolf would, training her in the kind of survival arts that would make Nic Cage’s character in Kick-Ass proud. But, of course, goons have to interrupt their isolated little life, as a band of former soldiers, who have an odd connection to the young woman that the Turkey Bastard has claimed as his own, break-in on one fateful night and try to take her away from him. It’ll take both of their smarts and skill for them to survive the night.
What elevates this from standard-yet-very-solid scumbag genre film to something wildly uncomfortable and interesting as well as ludicrously entertaining are its tenuous connections to the first film, which are, on the whole, flat-out crazy when placed in their context. We understand, say, Sarah Connor’s reaction to the T-800 when she glimpses the Gentle(r) Giant for the very first time in T2. Yet we’re armed with the knowledge that he’s good by then, and we know — and she will come to know — that this machine is an extension of her son, proof of her training has paid off in some level and of the man he will become after the worst possible future occurs. We know the experience of going back to ‘Nam will be cathartic for Rambo, ultimately, and his dual acts of vengeance and liberation may be for us as well, helping to wipe away his assault on small-town America from his record and from our minds.
But I could not once purge the image of the Turkey Bastard spitting out his own cum after failing to impregnate a captive burglar and then having said implement forced into his mouth by his captive from my mind, an action which is on a whole different level of unforgivably perverse than the starting points for either of those two action-oriented face turns. This creates a very different, very weird kind of suspense, and it’s how Don’t Breathe 2 keeps one’s attention so well. Sayagues forces one to doubt our newly-christened “hero” at every turn, even if we’re well-educated in genre tropes because we don’t know if this is just a façade, after all. It more than makes up for the lack of jump-scare theatrics that defined so much of the first installment, which felt like Alverez trying to go “straight,” much in the same way that James Wan did so with his milder horrors after he inaugurated the “Torture Porn” era with Saw. All of this makes it perversely compelling — what’s that Bastard gonna do next?? — as it also forces us to wonder about the other people in the room. Could the goons, somehow, be worse?
The answer, of course, is absolutely, of course they’re worse, and said home-invading baddies are saddled with a motivation that is so whacked-out and amusingly ludicrous and evil that I guarantee you will be either stunned into silence or howling with laughter, poles that I oscillated between for the entire third act. That’s when the movie fully kicks into gear and provides us with both Zatoichi-styled blind man action (there’s an ingenious use of a bell and a floor covered in water in two separate scenes), and the single greatest use of a drained pool as location since, well, Ping Lumpraploeng’s The Pool, the particulars of which become immediately apparent as soon as our characters enter the room. They can’t possibly do that, you’ll think, and then Sayagues does so. It is shockingly nasty and gory, in contrast to the “measured” suspense of the first film, with much of the splatter coming from well-realized and executed practical VFX work, placed in the middle of comprehensible action sequences that become more stimulating as they get crazier and crazier. It’s to Lang’s credit that any aspect of the character “redemption” manages to ring true — the muscle-bound aging actor is still an unmatched physical presence in this space. His weathered skin covers his biceps like a dusty foundation barely painted on as his hoarse whisper accumulates a Job-like pathos as he’s put through the wringer once again, the weight of his prior actions steadily weighing on him as he begins to realize just how far he’s fallen.
All in all, Don’t Breathe 2 is the kind of horror sequel I appreciate the most, much like Happy Death Day 2U or A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge, which tries to do something thematically and materially different from what made their original films successful. It has more in common with Joe Begos’ VFW (which also starred Lang) than it does Alverez’s original, and Sayagues swings hard for the fences, unafraid of landing in foul territory. Every gutterpunk pervert out there looking for something to watch this weekend at the multiplex, I say this to you: Don’t let this be a midnight-movie discovery for you in 30 years (though it’s fine if you do, ultimately), because it’s a rare treat to find something this miserably screwed-up and entertaining sharing screens adjacent to theaters playing fucking Paw Patrol.