Forklift mac review8/30/2023 ![]() The problems that plagued the first movie are also, at times, even more niggling here, mostly in the cheaply ineffective visuals chosen to announce the presence of the creatures, worsened here by some angelic effects that look like they came from a micro-budgeted faith-based drama. It feels nastier than the first and at times far more entertaining (the Pastors concoct some horribly efficient set pieces, one including a gnarly mass subway suicide is particularly successful) but without the anchor of Bullock and her utterly random yet ever-so-reliable supporting cast (from Moonlight’s MVP Trevante Rhodes to two-time Oscar nominee Jacki Weaver to a scenery-chewing Tom Hollander), it can also feel a little bit inconsequential. ![]() What the film has to say about the danger of religious fervor is admirably, and believably, bleak although its attempts to say something about the horror genre’s buzzword du jour – trauma – are less clear-eyed, words like grief and loss thrown up into the air, little care given to where they might land. The same raw elements remain – Sebastián eventually finds himself with a ragtag group of strangers, including Barbarian’s Georgina Campbell, as in the original – but the dynamic is different, the film shifting more focus on something that was less integral in the first, how some receive the visitors as a blessing rather than a curse. There’s an intriguing first act reversal that murks Sebastián’s mission, curdling from mere survival into something far more troubling, and while it’s not always successfully crafted and sometimes clumsily explained, it shows that the writer-director duo Alex and David Pastor are invested in genuinely trying to do something different with the spin-off. We meet his beleaguered father Sebastián after the creatures have arrived and encouraged suicide upon those who dare to look. As one might have guessed, the action has moved from California to Barcelona, replacing Bullock with The Invisible Guest’s Mario Casas. It again wields ambition beyond its means and is similarly lacking in the thrills it seems to think it’s providing but it’s mostly rather watchable schlock, finding a surprisingly nifty way into the story. There’s a similar muddle in the mid-summer spin-off Bird Box: Barcelona, an attempt to expand the world of the first and appeal to the streamer’s considerable Spanish-speaking audience. ![]() For all of its viral bluster, Bird Box was a sorry, sloppy spin on A Quiet Place with a far less effective sense-based danger and never quite working as a horror, a fantasy, a family drama or a survival thriller, parroting the work of others without bringing any sense of distinctive personality of its own. A barely visible cultural imprint and an uninterested leading lady be damned with the streamer hoping that almost five years later, enough people are able to remember a universe that most critics were happy to repress.
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