Don’t Breathe 2 — Review Thread

Don't Breathe pulled a T2 on us.

2016's Don't Breathe was a nice, simple, yet VERY well-done little surprise of a horror movie that knew how to capitalize on its straightforward concept, and even add a couple twists on top. It's also a movie I've found to hold up on repeat viewings surprisingly well. Now, five years later, comes a sequel and...well, at least we still have that first movie.

Not that Don't Breathe 2 ever struck me as particularly bad, it's just that it's mostly mediocre and average at best. It still has that certain slickness to it on a filmmaking level in spite of a change in director from Fede Alvarez to Rodo Sayagues, but this is less of a horror movie and more of a revenge action thriller. And quite the gritty one, at that. There's nothing that bad about taking a different approach with a sequel, and to this movie's credit, it really doubles down on that. But there IS a problem when it comes to how the film elects to also change its perception of Stephen Lang's Norman, aka The Blind Man, especially considering what he did in the first film. It seems that the filmmakers here took a bit of inspiration from Terminator 2, in that respect, but...The Terminator was never a rapist before his heel turn. So, yeah, all of a sudden Norman is being portrayed as a sympathetic sort of father figure, but it's a hard thing to buy when he did nothing in the first movie to warrant or earn such a turn. So, here, when he's supposed to be the hero, the movie tries to compensate by making these new villains even worse once their own motives are ultimately revealed. Yet, for me, the movie never got past the fact that Norman did some pretty reprehensible things in the first film and its attempts to humanize him in this one ultimately ring hollow.

Which, in turn, take away from the effectiveness of the suspense in this one. Although Stephen Lang and Madelyn Grace both do very solid work as the leads, I still had a tough time truly buying into the dynamic between them enough to really get invested in what happened to them. On a surface level, the movie is still well-made, though. Rodo Sayagues seems perfectly in-step with Fede Alvarez's style from the first film and stages a number of well-rendered single shots and set pieces that tap into the desired tone all well and good. But again...at the end of the day, it all just feels kind of empty and certainly not as memorable as the first. Sure, this movie provides its fair share of visceral thrills, but unlike the first film with Jane Levy's character, there's no sympathetic character here to really latch onto. Sure, you could make a case for the Madelyn Grace character in this one, but her relationship with Norman pretty much prevented that for me.

That leaves Don't Breathe 2 as essentially just a series of violent set pieces and while there's certainly things to admire about the movie on that level, there's not a whole lot else. It functions well enough as a rainy-afternoon watch for genre fans, but compared to how good the first one was, that this sequel only ever achieves that level of praise is a disappointment in and of itself, the Norman issue aside. As we all know, not ALL hit movies need sequels, and Don't Breathe 2 is proof of that.

**/****

I can tell you half-watched this movie.