Directed By Jon Harris
Starring Shauna Macdonald, Krysten Cummings and Natalie Jackson Mendoza
What’s a great film without an unnecessary sequel? “Rare” and “lucky” would be two fine adjectives. But while it’s all too easy to dismiss and avoid the unrelated direct-to-video follow-ups that plague NetFlix or LoveFilm, there’s an inescapable morbid curiosity when a sequel manages to snag the first film’s cast to return for a second outing. Sure, there’s every chance said sequel will be an utter cinematic abortion, but there’s always that slim, vain hope that somehow it’ll be the next Aliens or The Godfather: Part II, managing to capture or exceed the greatness of its predecessor despite the odds. Which category does The Descent: Part 2 fit into? Well, neither; simply content to retread the plot of the first film with added mundaneness, Jon Harris’ sequel isn’t memorably bad or surprisingly good, it’s just painfully bland.
Kicking off from the ending of the US cut, in which Sarah (Shauna Macdonald) made it out of the caves after the death of her potholing pals, Part 2 begins with our Scottish heroine rescued on the roadside, traumatised, with amnesia, and looking like she’s been spat out by a T-Rex. Already in the midst of a hunt for the missing girls with search-and-rescue teams, brash hick assclown Sheriff Vaines (Gavan O’Herlihy) deems newly-discovered Sarah as their ticket to finding the others, dragging the poor woman from her hospital bed and back into the caves (because, naturally, amnesiacs make the best guides). With his Deputy (Krysten Cummings), a veteran pro climber (Douglas Hodge) and two rookie caver interns (Anna Skellern and Joshua Dallas), they set off into the caves to search for Juno & Co., getting deaded along the way.
It wasn’t the brutal and ferocious monster attacks that unsettled in The Descent as much as the overwhelmingly claustrophobic marriage of sets and camerawork; early tunnel-crawling scenes were stomach-churningly enclosed, and it’s a testament to Marshall’s use of the frame, his writing and the actors’ work that the original film could’ve been just as tense and gut-wrenching as a regular cave-diving drama without the crawling nasties. It’s unfortunate but unsurprising then, that new director Jon Harris lacks the visual eye that Marshall is blessed with, and with the exception of a brief underwater tunnel crawl, there’s never any real sense of claustrophobia present in the film.
The absence of Marshall is felt in the set design too; the sets in the original were almost as distinct and eerily otherworldly as those in Ridley Scott’s Alien, but despite the return of cinematographer Sam McCurdy, the cave systems explored in Part 2 feel bland, pedestrian and fake, looking like they’ve been furnished with leftover Styrofoam boulders from the set of The Flintstones Movie. Adding to the problem, the caves are puzzlingly well-lit this time around, which is especially noticeable when two new characters stumble across a hanging corpse from the first movie – pitch black when we encountered the scene in Marshall’s film, but now bright as daylight. Awfully thoughtful of those crawlers to install cave wall sconce lighting for Shauna Macdonald’s return.
Confusingly, the creature design has also been re-jigged, with the creepy original Crawlers (which looked like some hideous genetic hybrid mash-up of Gollum, Iggy Pop and a human foetus) now just plain-old orcs. Along with the visual tweaks, the monsters also feel less ferocious than before, therefore much less fearsome. What’s lost in tension and claustrophobic dread is substituted with oodles of gooey gore, though – with monster heads being liquefied by boulders, punched to goo and generally impaled, stabbed and beaten at regular intervals, gorehounds will find much to distract them. But while The Descent’s creature-smooshings felt satisfying and cathartic because we cared about the characters, wanting them to survive and beat the club-fisted bejesus out of everything threatening them, this time around we really don’t care, and seemingly neither do the writers – the majority of the cast is unceremoniously dispatched by the half-way point.
The new-comers to the cast range from bland to “Why isn’t he dead already?”, with none of the care or effortless character development of the first present here. It’s gratifying that the Deputy isn’t saddled with the token wisecracking Queen Latifa-esque sassy sidekick as most lazy sequels would, and there’s a cave-in scene with rookie climber Cath that’s effective enough, but the new characters all simply peter out and go nowhere. Which just leaves Shauna MacDonald delivering work far better than the material with not much to do, while duplicitous megabitch Juno unsurprisingly emerges to snarl and grimace her way through the last act like she studied at Michelle Rodriguez’s Summer School of Scowl-Acting. While it’s fun to see them reunited, there’s just nowhere new to take the characters, and it just cements the feeling that the whole movie is needless, with the tacked-on ending as eye-rollingly moronic as any in recent memory.
For those unable to resist the urge to revisit the characters they enjoyed the first time around, The Descent: Part 2 might provide enough entertainment with lowered expectations – there’s enough mushy grue and action to stave off boredom, and it’s certainly not the worst sequel in the history of cinema. But it never treads any new or worthwhile ground, bereft of the pervasive claustrophobic terror and natural character work that made the first film so effective, instead ranging from offensively dumb in its worst moments to merely mundane in its best.
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The Descent: Part 2 is out on UK DVD & Blu-ray on 12th April 2010 and in the US on April 27th.