When deciding to take a villain from a genre flick and flip the audience’s perception of them for a sequel or reimagining, much like the characters in 2016’s stonking thriller Don’t Breathe, you have to be as exceptionally careful to tread as lightly as you can. The rehabilitation of the Terminator or Velociraptors, for example can simply be explained away with newer versions programmed or trained to fight on the side of the angels and all Disney had to do to shine a new light on Maleficent was to change her back story to make her the victim.
But what do you do when your bad guy has done truly bad things; things that can’t be so easily undone by a swift ret-con or a change of heart? This is the rather problematic issue facing Don’t Breathe 2, a follow up that ditches it’s surviving leads in favour of giving Stephen Lang’s grief twisted Blind Man somewhat of a redemptive arc that involves kidnapping, organ transplants and multiple bludgeonings by a claw hammer…
Eight years after the original movie’s home invasion, we rejoin vengeful veteran The Blind Man (aka Norman Nordstrom) in a more peaceful mood as he raises his eleven year old daughter with a strict hand in order to protect her from the cruel outside world. “Wait… hold up… Eleven year old daughter?” I hear you question after a quick bout of rudimentary mathematics; and you’d be right to be confused seeing as Nordstrom’s daughter was cruelly taken from him in a car accident long ago. It seems that years prior he found the child, whom he subsequently named Phoenix, comatose in the deserted streets and took her in as his own to quell the grief that’s caused him to do horrendous things in the past. First all intents and purposes it’s worked as Norman seems genuinely repentful for the things he’s done, but it doesn’t change the fact that’s he’s stolen a whole child and told her she is his daughter like the world randomly did him a massive fucking solid.
At eleven, Phoenix is starting to yearn for a life that doesn’t involve “survival drills” or spend every waking hour with a blind old dude and his dog, but a chance meeting with Raylan, a notorious meth dealer, causes the gangster and his crew to raid The Blind Man’s house that night. You see, Raylan is Phoenix’s real father and the fire she survived was his meth lab burning down which cost him eight years in jail, but now he wants his daughter back and he doesn’t care who he has to kill to get her. But does this fucked up creep really want to play happy families again or does he have a far more sinister ulterior motive in store – hey, this is a movie franchise that paints Detriot, Michigan as a desolate, poverty stricken, dystopian shit hole – what do you think his motives are?
Nonetheless, the stage is set for a gloriously ugly showdown pitting Raylan’s equally skeevy gang against The Blind Man’s impeccable survival instincts – someone’s gonna get hurt.
On a purely technical level, Don’t Breathe 2 is a worthy sequel in so far that it’s an incredibly tense game of stunningly brutal cat and mouse that’s being enacted by people with morals murkier than open sewage. The first movie saw Jane Levey’s trio of robbers fall foul of the Blind Man who, aside from being a sight impaired killing machine, had the woman who had killed his child in an automobile accident muzzled in his basement pregnant with his child thanks to some stupendously ghastly artificial insemination. It was this constant rug pulling that kept us deliriously on our toes as the players stalked each other around the old man’s tricked out house and while the sequel falls short on any similar surprises, it doubles down on having some of the most unrelentingly grim violence you’ll see all year. Limbs are hacked and skulls are cracked in this movie’s insatiable desire to have you lean back in your cinema seat and exclaim “Fucking Hell!” directly at the screen and while thankfully the message behind all the messy maulings isn’t as worrisome as say, Rambo: Last Blood, there is one inescapable fact that Don’t Breathe 2, formal it’s brutal efficiency simply can’t surmount: the fact that it’s protagonist was a kidnapping rapist only one film prior…
While fully taking into account the fact that Norman Nordstrom was most likely deranged with grief when he embarked on his shocking plan to replace his daughter, the fact that the sequel tries to give him a redemptive arc is tougher to swallow than that turkey baster full of spunk he was forced to choke down in the first film’s most notorious moment and while he now fully accepts and regrets the monster that he is, that hasn’t stopped him adopting/kidnapping a comatose child or simply just turning himself in. Having him finally admit out loud that he does now consider himself a rapist (he flagrantly denied it in Part 1) just isn’t good enough to avoid having a movie that barely has a single redeemable adult character in the whole thing – and even that person is bludgeoned with a hammer in short order.
With all that being said – and know that I’m treading incredibly carefully here – if there was a way to exorcise that whole thread from the movie (don’t try, there isnt), then Don’t Breathe 2 would be a fantastically grim slice of exploitation that contains some superlative stalking scenes, yet another cast iron performance from genre fave Stephen Lang (whom I could personally watch obliterate low life scum all the live long day and these guys are world class turds) and which faithfully follows the remit of the orginal by having all moral lines obliterated beyond all repair. However, by taking things so far, the script by Fede Alvarez and new director Rodo Sayagues, simply leaves us no one to root for except for Phoenix, which means we have to root for the person best qualified to keep her safe – the dude who took her off the street and illegally kept her for eight years.
Putting moral obligations aside for a second, the action is stunningly brutal very well done, but if watching a guy who’s had his mouth and nose sealed shut by super glue have a breathing hole provided for him by his buddy stabbing him through the cheek with a screwdriver (not exactly the method I would have chosen) makes you feel queasy then I’d maybe suggest that this movie ain’t for you. However, if your tastes stretch to the hyper violent, then Don’t Breathe 2 proves to be an exhilarating, tooth loosening trip – it’s just a shame the moral quagmire extends far beyond the boundaries of the movie itself…
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