Main cast: Emily Blunt (Evelyn Abbott), Cillian Murphy (Emmett), Millicent Simmonds (Regan Abbott), Noah Jupe (Marcus Abbott), and Djimon Hounsou (The Man on the Island)
Director: John Krasinski
I’m sure everyone is surprised to learn that A Quiet Place Part II is a sequel to A Quiet Place. Aside from that movie spawning a thankfully short-lived slew of copycats, it also keeps alive that horrible thing that caused pretty much every single calamity that befall the Abbott family: that annoying Regan Abbott. Yes, her father is dead because of her, but is she sorry? No, watch as in this movie, she runs off by herself to do her own thing. It’s a good thing that she takes the capable family friend, Emmett, with her, leaving her mother Emily to fend for the kid Marcus and the baby all alone!
No, she doesn’t die by the end of this movie either. Lead female characters don’t die anymore in horror films these days, more the pity because I’d be thrilled to never see Regan ever again. Seriously, even the final scene of this film is a shot of her face. Bug off.
Anyway, this absolutely necessary, snort, sequel takes off from the previous movie, which saw Regan causing the death of her four-year old brother and stinking up the joint with her pinch-faced “the world is falling around us but HOW ABOUT ME-EE-EE?” attitude, before the whole mess she started ended up killing her father. That’s okay, though, you see, because she is deaf and her father found ways to incapacitate the monsters terrorizing them with high frequency sound. Because being a woman and having a disability are both superpowers these days, Regan naturally manages to create a method to weaponize her deafness and the high frequency sounds from her cochlear implant to be a superhero. Bye, mom and kid and baby, she’s off to save the world now without much ado and taking away the man that could have protected her family with her.
Really, this movie is pretty much a cash-in on the success of the previous movie. There is anything here that needs to be told, and what is told here is made up of typical, played out apocalyptic horror tropes, like how people can be bigger monsters than the very monsters themselves, et cetera. Oh, and what a surprise, the black guy is of course positioned as the head of the survivors and is played by Djimon Hounsou, the budget black actor that people go to when they can’t afford Idris Elba.
I mean, the movie isn’t bad for a very familiar affair. While Regan makes me want to donate money to some childfree organization every time she stinks up the screen, and god she does that way too often, the rest of the cast is pretty good. I can’t get excited over the whole thing, though, because everything here feels like both a retread and an extension of the first movie that has long outlived its welcome.
