What can you possibly say about “[Rec] 2” that at least raises the eyebrows of the uninitiated? The paper-thin sequel packs a critic-proof triple punch. It’s a horror film, and if it works on a few basic, primal levels, fans will be loyal. It’s a sequel, so if you’ve seen the not-bad “[Rec]” then you’re probably sold already. But, more interestingly, it’s yet another product from horror’s odd embrace of the “found footage” aesthetic, one that finds its roots from “Cannibal Holocaust” up until the pre-millennial influence of “The Last Broadcast” and “The Blair Witch Project,” through the new technology age bringing us “Paranormal Activity,” “Cloverfield” and “Diary of the Dead.” Why must we comment on these films, when in fact they are commenting on us?
These features carry promise in their ability to properly capture our neuroses and passive-aggressive attitude towards technology – horror is nothing if not the fear of the progressive and the victory of the conservative. As a result, these films have been made in a detached attempt to dissect and denigrate our reliance on technology and how our need to document has dominated our lives. We’d have escaped that monster, y’see, had we not been trying to steady our tripods.
The first “[Rec],” bloodlessly remade in America as “Quarantine,” didn’t have much to offer the scholarly horror moviegoers in the audience, but it still succeeded within the framework of the genre. The found footage conceit – where the audience is ostensibly witnessing the last videotaped moments of a select group of victims – has to be treated as a legit manner of making a film, though it seems like a narrative conceit that can, and has, carried only a handful of films so far. Found footage movies live within their limitations, and as such already have a set of rules similar to, say, the Dogme 95 movement: dialogue must be improvised, loud, profane and inarticulate, the supernatural should be reduced to its most primal and mundane and the action must be reduced to an intimate setting (the latter was broken by “Cloverfield,” arguably the most successful of this type of picture).
As such, “[Rec]” came at what we’d like to believe was the tail-end of this filmmaking movement, sacrificing insight and autocriticism for genuine cheap thrills. The best you can do with these pictures when you have no greater goal than immediacy and artificial tension is to have a legit filmmaker at the helm, and in experienced Spanish directors Jaume Balaguero and Paco Plaza, the first film was able to mount a few successful moments of scares and staple them into a lackluster, underwhelming narrative. Centered around an overzealous television host and her cameraman, “[Rec]” used a lower-middle-class tenement to stage a full-on demonic zombie outbreak, with only a savvy group of firefighters to serve as fall guys to ratchet suspense.
The first film works in obvious ways, because not only are the action set pieces doled out economically, but the story has a logical consistency that benefits from the genre’s intimate demands. The second film, “[Rec] 2,” also from Balaguero and Plaza, doesn’t work because it violates those very demands in basic, simplistic ways. Even with the potential for second installments, some films are invalidated by sequels, and “[Rec] 2” is a perfect example.
Set immediately after the first film, part two subscribes to the more-is-more school of thought that turned horror films “The Terminator” and “Alien” into “Terminator 2” and “Aliens” – hello, heavy artillery. The “viral outbreak” of the first film has attracted the attention of four SWAT guys and a mysterious “health official” with ties to the Vatican. Instead of one camera, there are four, centralized in the headgear of each soldier to allow for multiple angles and perspectives. Together with each characters’ armed-to-the-teeth approach, the roving-through-hallways-shooting-zombies mode looks a whole lot like a video game, and since we don’t really get to know any of these guys, it’s not far removed. Given that these protagonists seem slightly more prepared for action than the victims of the first film, inarticulate turns of phrase are replaced by action cliches: lots of chatter about “the mission” and “I didn’t sign up for this”-type bromides.
With this more violent approach, “[Rec] 2” sets about tearing down whatever mystery was left over from the first film. The top floor that provided the first film’s nervy final moments is one of the first places our characters visit, and the action is no longer the fear of grasping in the dark, but instead a station-to-station quest to find a few keys or signifiers or something similarly nebulous that feeds into the film’s dank video game aesthetic. Once we learn the true intentions of the “health inspector,” he becomes a vain analog to Paul Reiser in “Aliens,” and we are forced to acknowledge we’ll get far less mileage out of these cannon-fodder-with-guns types.
Halfway through the movie, the narrative refreshes, and we get to see the action through a civilian camera belonging to a group of ill-defined, paranoid teenagers. This change in perspective allows us to witness select events we’ve already seen from another angle, but any other motivation seems to be lost on an initial viewing. Moreso, the found footage conceit breaks with this shift – we have no reason to understand exactly what compels either the SWAT team or the teenagers to insist on the need for documentation, the purpose of continuing to hold a camera up high and film while your friends are being slaughtered by zombies. It’s not supported narratively or thematically, and at the film’s close, it appears as if the story is more desperately in search of another camera from which to tell the tale than it is on its own flimsy MacGuffin.
In case you wanted answers as to why this “virus” behaves like it does, or what exactly resides on that top floor/basement, you won’t be disappointed. Not that this seems very interesting – needless to say, it revolves around another cynical, half-hearted Vatican cover up, and eventually a supernatural shadow world that continues the gamer aesthetic but might be the single dumbest visual conceit in any genre film this year. By the close of “[Rec] 2,” you’ve experienced a few decent jolts here and there, but have reached a climax that not only doesn’t even begin to hold a candle to the frenetic conclusion of the first installment, but reveals the nature of evil at play in a way that cheapens the bleak mysteries of the series’ backstory. A prequel is in the works, as clearly the filmmakers think they’ve ended on some sort of bravura note, when in fact they’ve eliminated everything that works about a tight genre exercise for a cash-in sequel. [C-]