This was the first film I’ve seen on the big screen since March 2020, which is when it was originally scheduled to be released. Of course, you know why it was delayed, and why I went so long avoiding movie theaters. Now that things are getting somewhat back to normal, I caught up with John Krazinski’s sequel to his 2018 sleeper hit, A QUIET PLACE. I had enjoyed the first film, which depicts a family headed by the real life married couple Krasinski and Emily Blunt as Lee and Evelyn Abott trying to survive in a post apocalyptic world where tall, lanky blind aliens with multiple rows of sharp teeth will kill them if they make even the slightest sounds.
Although Krasinski’s character, Lee Abbott, was killed in the original, he appears here in a flashback opening which goes back to the first day of the alien attack. The scary creatures violently interrupt a little league game in an unspecified small town (somewhere in upstate New York), and it’s a thrilling sequence that I wish the movie stayed with longer.
Instead we flash forward to Day 474, 385 days since
the events of Part I, and we find Blunt’s Evelyn and her kids, Regan (Millicent
Simmonds), who’s deaf, and Marcus (Noah Jupe), who’s main trait is that he’s very
nervous, living on the same farm, but not for long as the Halpert, sorry,
Abbott family sets on a supply run across dangerous, devastated terrain. Oh,
yeah, there’s the baby that Evelyn had in the previous installment, but he
mostly naps in a soundproof wooden crate, or sucks on an oxygen canister.
Presumably
because writer/director Krasinski thought they needed a moody male presence
since the Dad is gone, Cillian Murphy pops up as Emmett an old friend of the
family. Murphy’s character is a little reminiscent of his role in DUNKIRK, as
he’s also a traumatized solider.
Much of the
movie is set at a compound, a former Steel Mill, where Emmett lives in an
air-tight bunker. Some of these scenes drag, but there are enough jolts, and
shocks to keep one engaged. The last third concerns Emmett and Regan finding
themselves at an island colony of survivors who act as if things are getting
back to normal. The colony’s leader, Djimon Hounsou credited as “Man on the
Island,” brings the promise of a weighty note to the narrative, but he doesn’t
last long enough for his part to have much impact.
The finale, of
course, is the family/monster showdown, and there’s a clever element to how the
humans attempt to take down their slimey tormenters (I won’t Spoil it).
However, I liked PART II a lot less than PART I. It didn’t feel as grounded or
as emotionally gripping, and a lot of its tries to mirror the beats and scares
of the original I could really see coming. It’s fitting that the film skips
from one location to another, as it often feels like it’s all over the place.
Where is a quiet place anyway? Is it the farm from PART I and part of PART II?
Is it at the top of one of those silos? Or is it somewhere inside of us all?
A QUIET PLACE
PART II is a fair follow-up that will likely be most appreciated by fans of the
first one. It does have the highlight of the performance by Simmonds, who could
very be seen as the film’s lead protagonist. Blunt puts in a solid, intense
turn too, as does Murphy, but Simmonds steals this sequel fair and square.
More later...
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