‘The Ring Two:’ don’t waste your money

After seeing “The Ring Two,” I concluded that it’s very sad when a movie sequel has to linger on without the company of its biggest star.

And anyone who thinks Naomi Watts was the star of”The Ring” either hasn’t seen the movie or is a contributing member to her die-hard fan club (an underground cult movement started after the release of “Children of the Corn IV: The Gathering”).

The starring role also didn’t belong to the film’s creepy little devil-child antagonist, Samara. The real star of “The Ring” was a short black and white video tape containing two minutes of stock footage from a Rob Zombie music video that happens to kill whoever watches it. Coincidentally, it takes seven days for a person to die after seeing this film, which is six days, twenty three hours, and fifty six minutes longer than it takes to die from any other Rob Zombie music video, naturally making it the most watchable.

Naomi Watts and rising child star, David Dorfman, were left to carry the video’s fading torch. Even the first film was plagued by their utter incompetence as a convincing mother and child.

Aiden Keller, Dorfman’s character, picks up exactly where he left off in the previous film, drifting eerily through the film like a midget mortician pumped to the eyelids with Thorozine, while Naomi Watts literally radiates the screen with her two billion watt hair color, which could probably be more efficiently used by NASA to propel ultra thin aluminum probes to the furthest reaches of space. Her performance doesn’t fare much better, either.

The first film conveyed the fractured relationship between Rachel and her son. In the second, it’s all but javelined into the viewer’s skull. Rachael comes across as more of a distant but dedicated babysitter than a mother, and throughout both films it seems like she just met Aiden about an hour ago in a dark ally corner somewhere.

“The Ring Two” attempts to build on the solid foundation of mystery portrayed in its predecessor. After the tape claims a new victim in the town where Rachael and Aiden have moved, Rachael finds and destroys it before it can again work its deadly magic on the unwitting populace. Upon destroying the video, she releases the spirit of Samara, who subsequently possesses her son. Of course, she’s only fairly sure that the tape she destroys is the actual Ring video and not some television recording of American Idol, which would have released an egocentric demonic spirit that harshly criticizes both her and her son in every facet of their personality.

Since she lucks out and only releases the spirit of Samara, her job becomes to find the little girl’s true mother in hopes of purging the poltergeist before it can use her son to go on an obsessive killing spree, which unfortunately happens anyway.

Director Hideo Nakata, who directed the original “The Ring” in 1998, can’t seem to climb beyond the phenomenally bad writing presented here. However, for every scene well directed, another writing flaw rears its ugly over-budgeted head.

Posted by Colonnade Archives on Apr 8 2005. Filed under Other. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry