P2 (Review)

The “2” I get… but I can’t decide if the “P” stands for “perky” or “push-up”.

There isn’t a great deal to P2, actually bugger all really, but that is part of its charm.

On Christmas Eve a young businesswoman named Angela is working back late in her plush office building before heading off to a family dinner.

She eventually packs up and leaves, shuffling down to the underground carpark with the few remaining staff and security personnel. She arrives at her car and heads off into the night…

Only she doesn’t. The car won’t start and Angela momentarily pauses in the now deserted carpark to wonder what to do next. Angela heads to the security station – a small office in the carpark – to see if anyone can provide assistance, it is here that she meets Tom (Wes Bentley). Tom is friendly, effusive and willing to help, except nothing he does gets the car moving.

“Taxi!” says Angela, but unfortunately no security staff are manning the ground level office and she cannot get out to meet with the taxi and it takes off. Back to the underground, with the main lights now off everything is far more ominous. This is only exacerbated when Angela herself mysteriously get hers lights knocked out also…

Angela comes to take stock of where she is and how she got there – and why she is now wearing a pristine white dress instead of her business suit. All is answered shortly after…

Look lots of stuff happens from this point. It’s fair to say that Angela is in for a pretty shitty night, almost as bad as the dinner with her relatives would have been. She gets stalked, tortured, tased and threatened over and again, and seemingly no-one is around to help.

My issue is with plausibility, sure it’s a horror movie so who cares? But in reality the protagonist in this film would have been caught 1,000 times over within minutes if anything resembling the events in P2 actually happened. There are multiple mobile phone calls, a series of unwitting witnesses who would have twigged with the benefit of hindsight (if questioned), the taxi driver who clearly saw Angela… her own family who spoke to her multiple times at different stages.

Maybe the bad guy thought of this and didn’t care, which begs the question as to why he kept trying to cover his tracks?

In any case the one thing I am now positive of after 20 years of serious movie watching is this: If you are ever in the unenviable position that you desperately need police assistance make sure you ask for real cops, as movie cops are dumb as fuck and in film after film miss the most obvious clues and ignore the most blatant veiled bragging by the bad guys.

The second thing I learned from P2 is that an elevator fills with water in literally seconds, if you’ve ever stood with your foot covering the drain in the shower you know how long that takes to fill to your ankle, so an elevator being immersed in under a minute seems a little odd to me.

P2 is simply a film about a situation: what would you do if you were trapped in one spot with someone nasty hellbent on making life difficult. Were it not for Angela’s heaving cleavage I might not have paid attention to the entire second half – but heave it did. The two leads do the best they could with the logic free plot, and not much really happens in the film, but when it does it is quite gory.

I’d suggest though that you don’t bother watching it twice, once is bad enough, but the second time I was constantly wondering to myself “why didn’t she…?” and “how could they…?”.

Final Rating – 6.5 / 10. 4 levels of logically challenged cat and mouse, but  a couple of decent scenes help you momentarily shelve your internal voice of reason… and Angela’s “best supporting actors” do their best to help you remain awake.

About OGR

While I try to throw a joke or two into proceedings when I can all of the opinions presented in my reviews are genuine. I don't expect that all will agree with my thoughts at all times nor would it be any fun if you did, so don't be shy in telling me where you think I went wrong... and hopefully if you think I got it right for once. Don't be shy, half the fun is in the conversation after the movie.
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