Review by Ben Bussey
If this really is James Wan’s kind-of/sort-of/almost-certainly-not-really last horror movie, the director certainly hasn’t shamed himself. We might ponder whether he’s not selling himself short kissing the genre goodbye, however, when his supposed swansong is essentially a direct retread of (arguably) his finest hour.
Yes, I really enjoyed the original Insidious. It didn’t change my life in any way, but I had a lot of fun with it. I liked how it played with my expectations; how it had an understated, slow-burn opening hour, suggesting it was going to be yet another one of those less-is-more ghost movies in which you see nothing and all the scares are fake-outs, sudden door slams etc… but then the longer it went on, the more it turned that expectation on its head with weird ghosts aplenty, all of which you could see, all of whom were clearly actual actors there on set and not wisps of CGI haphazardly painted in afterwards. And then that wonderfully ridiculous finale, wherein it took us literally into the ghost realm, again having the good sense to keep it all somehow tangible and small scale, with a deluge of surreal sights left and right. Was it anything we hadn’t seen already in The Shining, the Phantasm series, or any number of Argento movies we might mention? Probably not – but it was unlike any other horror movie that had made its way to multiplexes in 2011. No, it didn’t rock the world or rejuvenate the genre, but it was a perfectly enjoyable break from the norm.
A bit sad, then, that Insidious 2 falls into the same old sequel trap of retracing basically the exact same steps as before. They grab that old genie by the short and curlies, do their damnedest to shove him back into the bottle, and try to make Rose Byrne go through the same gradual realisation that something spooky’s going on, and have Patrick Wilson do the same “you’re imagining things” routine, only this time they get to regularly say – wait for it – “we’ve been through this before!” To which anyone with the original Insidious fresh in their memory will readily concur.
Even so, the old maxim about not fixing what ain’t broken isn’t without some merit. I’m sure we’d all be hard pressed to count the number of sequels which have basically replayed the original, yet still wound up perfectly entertaining movies. And so it is here. Insidious Chapter 2 is still an enjoyable enough ghost movie, even if it doesn’t stray very far from the parameters set by its predecessor – indeed, at points it directly revisits the original in a nice, reasonably quirky way (I’m not sure if it’s more Back to the Future Part II, or the police station sequence of Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure).
And, in common with its predecessor, it’s extraordinarily silly. So stupendous is its silliness, you honestly wouldn’t be surprised for Graham Chapman to wander on in full military regalia and demand, “stop that! It’s silly.”
Wan and writer/co-star Leigh Whannell have long demonstrated clear signs of being Argento fanboys. The flashes of surrealism in Saw – the tricycle riding puppet, the pig mask – paved the way to all manner of irrational sights in the first Insidious, to say nothing of the somewhat stilted dialogue and characterisations (which, I suspect, may well be knowingly so). This time, however, I do have to wonder if they’re just trying a bit too hard, throwing as much shit as they can at the wall and seeing what sticks. It’s almost ironic that, in the midst of their clear eagerness to break with convention, they fall back on one of the most overused staples of horror; the cross-dressing psycho with mommy issues. You be forgiven for thinking every gender-confused person that ever lived wound up on a homicidal rampage, given that’s almost all they ever do in the movies. Pardon my PC-consciousness, but I feel like we should be past this one by now.
Nor does the ‘let’s point and laugh at the weirdo’ stuff end there, thanks to the really rather painful attempts at comedy interplay between Whannel and Angus Sampson as parapsychologists Specs and Tucker. I gather Wan and Whannell were trying to consciously insert a bit of real humour into proceedings this time, mostly via these characters, but deary me – this is some feeble, almost Michael Bay level stuff. They’re either emphasising their nerdiness and physical ineffectuality, or hinting at homoerotic tension between the two of them, all hellbent (no pun intended) on getting laughs. It really takes me aback sometimes how filmmakers working within a genre which is largely defined by its subcultural appeal still fall into the same trap of mocking those who don’t meet the supposed norm. But even if these scenes don’t send you into a storm of anti-conformist rage, there’s no avoiding how juvenile it all is; one big dramatic scene crescendos with a butt joke, for crying out loud. It’s really weak, and given that the ending implies that these guys may wind up the focus on the inevitable Insidious 3, it does make me shudder to think what else we can look forward to.
Still, Insidious Chapter 2 obviously isn’t the first horror movie to carry some unsavoury political overtones without compromising its entertainment value too badly. Again, I should imagine a more common complaint will simply be its silliness, and the fact that it’s pretty much all been done already, but so long as you’re not expecting too much there’s no reason you won’t have a perfectly good time with this movie. Even so, I do hope that James Wan does come back to horror in some capacity in the future, regardless of whether it’s sooner or later. He successfully avoided repeating himself by sidestepping the Saw sequels; it’s a shame that he should wind up doing just that with what looks to be the second major horror franchise he’s kick-started.
Insidious Chapter 2 is out now in cinemas all over this world and the next, from Entertainment One.