(Note on spoilers - only small spoilers, big ones purposefully avoided.)
An utter waste of budget that better writing and some attention to detail could've salvaged.
In no particular order:
1. They set it in Appalachia, and they didn't have an American consultant, or if they did, they didn't listen.
The actors and actresses are so European it's not funny. Greg (Josh Dallas) is the only one who doesn't sound like he's from Europe, and he's the only one whose accent doesn't sound bizarre. As an American watching Europeans try to be American, it's like watching extraterrestrials try to mimic humans. They're close, but you can still spot them.
On the positive side, after seeing this, Americans will be able to empathize with the pain Scots feel every time they have to watch someone butcher their accent.
There are a couple of Euro actors who played European characters, and this itself was fine. The globetrotting caving team is less jarring than accents that are, for lack of a better term "off".
I'd cut them slack on things like the environment not looking right, the fact they couldn't get North American wildlife in an early scene, the road signs and pavement markings all being wrong, and things they can't fix without filming in the US, but there's a limit. It makes things look "off".
When you have the caricature hillbilly local wearing a NY Yankees cap, you've missed the mark.
2. Smell and show, don't tell
When your characters fall in a pit filled with gross liquid and chunks that's at the very bottom of a cave filled with CHUD goblins, we could probably guess that's poop.
We know you're not throwing your actors in a puddle of poop, but the characters don't have to swim in it, pick it up, and then ask what it is, only to have a cannibal kobold drop a deuce on them just so you can show us it's poop.
The characters will know it's poop. Poop smells. Carnivore poop is rank.
Characters could have reactions to this. They could hack, they could gag, they could puke. Then we'd know it's utterly vile. You could do a shot of some partially digested human parts in it if you wanted to do gross out.
Forgetting your characters can smell is pretty bad.
When "The Long Kiss Goodnight" forgot that gasoline smells, it was asinine and broke the plot.
When The Descent 2 forgot that poop smells, it was just lazy.
3. Jump scares
Jump scares are cheap. Overuse them and the audience stops caring, and looking for the next jump scare rather than follow the story.
4. Phenomenally Bad Character Decisions To Setup The Movie
I know it's a horror film, and I know characters frequently make bad decisions, but the true reason for those bad decisions is typically bad writing because the writer has to get characters to a place to do a thing and can't come up with a good reason.
The idea that a sheriff anywhere would have such exceptionally bad judgement as to try to drag an unspeaking semi-comatose woman who just emerged from a cave covered in blood and use her as a guide through a cave of horrors is so bizarre that it just breaks the plot from the get go.
Now, laziness and ineptitude, sure. Those things are commonplace in law enforcement. You could have a sheriff who doesn't call for more help, doesn't think the deaths were really a thing, comes up with some plan to cover his own ass while distracting from the real problem, and those would all work in the context of the story quite well. (Florida's Broward County Sheriff Israel and his department's complete inaction on 37 visits for various complaints and crimes to a mass shooter's house before he murdered a dozen people comes to mind)
The sheriff being like the mayor in Jaws saying "everything is fine" because he doesn't want the county to look bad, it's an election year and he wants to wrap this up, etc. Those all work for excuses for bad decisions. In none of those would he take the traumatized woman down into the cave again.
It's an easy fix that they didn't do. Send high speed team of search trauma rescue guys down there, have them killed/disappear. Sarah hears this, begs and pleads that she has to go down if they're going to go again. Second string amateur globetrotting Euro cavers she goes with argue that she may know the cave route and her flight plan and she should go. Sheriff faced with balance of bad publicity from losing team and prospect of things going better decides "this may cost me the election, but if you think you can, and I'm going with you to turn you around if this gets worse". Problem solved.
5. Excruciatingly Bad Character Decisions In The Cave
So your fellow caver gets jumped by a maneating troglodyte and there's three of you and one of it. You're in a cave filled with rocks and you have a bag full of climbing tools. If you:
Grab your rock axe and plunge it in the thing's neck, turn to page 87
Grab a rock and smash its head, turn to page 38
Run away in horror, turn to page 3
Grab your friends mouth so she can't scream and watch the monster kill your expedition leader, close the book and go away now.
There are a lot of "get killed" decisions that unfortunately make sense only in the context of killing characters off.
Each cheap death pulls the audience further from the story. The Descent didn't make light of or have stupid deaths, the Descent 2 doesn't know what it's doing.
6. Chekhov's Cave-In and Lights
I'm just a tad skeptical of the idea that "a gun going off in a cave is like dynamite". Decades of warfare in Tora Bora has proven that to be absurd, but let's give the benefit of the doubt and attribute that to individual cave architecture and plot magic.
The sheriff with his revolver (complete with the obligatory "triggerhappy Americans and their guns" line) runs into one of the creatures early on and rather than turn on lights and shoot the thing, turns off lights and uses a thermal scanner to make his ability to see and shoot worse.
This may come as a surprise to absolutely no one except the makers of the Descent 2, but cops have flashlights. Right up there with cave explorers, they're people who use flashlights a lot. They tend to have good flashlights. Circa 2009 when the movie was made, Surefires and Streamlights were already a thing. The days of the XFiles Maglite were already over.
The logic of "turn lights off to see better" is so terrible it destroys tension by making it laughable. You just wait for the jump scare.
7. Forgetting Your Own Rules
Horror movies tend to have monsters with some kind of rule so we understand how they work. The ones in the Descent can't see, but can hear really well. IIRC the original they were entirely blind, which would suggest you could just put on as many lights as you want and then just stay quiet, which would have its own creepy aspect - like the Star Trek scenes walking around Borg ships.
In the Descent 2, they can still hear really well, but apparently stop hearing whenever its convenient. If I were some kind of subterranean ogre where my cave had recently been invaded by surface humans and I heard humans talking at the bottom of my toilet after hearing my friend scream from the toilet, I'd wonder "are there humans down there?"
There are too many "monster hears, then monster leaves" scenes to list, but they're all bad. We don't get real tension like the first movie.
8. General Horror Contrivances and Overall Bleh
There are plenty of other really bad, pointless scenes, scenes that exist purely for jump scare, dialog is so basic it's just sad, and overall it just sucks.
The Descent has a few horror contrivances, but makes up for it with better writing, good claustrophobic environments, good lighting and a thoughtful way to approach its material.
The Descent 2 is filled with tedious horror contrivances and decisions that exist to put characters in terrible situations. And therein lies the problem.
Horrible decisions don't pull you into a story, they take you out of it. You don't empathize with the characters, you say "that's stupid, I'd never do that" or worse "that's stupid, NO ONE would ever do that" and then you're just there waiting for the next jump scare, which is more jarring than scary as you come to expect it.
9. Positives (mostly wasted)
The gore effects were clearly something that someone enjoyed making, even if the blood looks like tomato soup. If that was a stylistic choice to show vivid colors of life, it wasn't really that helpful in light of the rest of the film.
The stunt players doing the crawling as the monsters are good, they're effective at making them look strange and disturbing, and it's a shame that it was wasted in this film. Even if the monsters parallel the ones in half the Resident Evil movies and Pandorum, I'll cut them some slack.
There's one twist I didn't expect that was a surprise, but then turned bleh very quickly, because the characters don't act like people.
Overall, the movie is a waste. With actual writing and some attention to detail it could've been a decent sequel. Ha.
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