| Horror sequels, the very notion
tends to get one prepared for either retreads
of the previous film’s plot or for the movie
to take the series in a bizarre, often illogical,
direction. In this regard, One Missed Call
2 does little to break the stereotype. In
fact, it tends to commit both criticisms, although
the latter is the one that becomes truly problematic.
While Takashi Miike’s film that started
the series was entertaining fluff in an over popularized
Japanese horror genre, this movie is just there.
Like sequels in the genre before it, One Missed
Call 2 is an entirely unneeded film that
rewrites the mythos established by the first,
although at least not to the same degree that
Spiral
(1998) committed to the Ring series,
while also taking the story in a strange direction
that doesn’t make a great deal of sense.
The actors, and the characters that they inhibit,
are also pretty weak across the board, and while
the production values on this film are fairly
high for the genre, they still do little to elevate
the movie as a whole.
The plot of the movie starts roughly
one year after the events that occurred in the
first film. Apparently, Yumie Nakamura killed
Hiroshi Yamashita about a year ago before vanishing,
while the police continue to try and discover
exactly what took place. In the meantime, more
deaths have started to occur, each following the
person receiving a cell phone call with the same
ring tone from a year ago, while hearing himself
or herself in the future just before they die.
The cases differ in one way, though: they lack
Mimiko’s trademark candy that was placed
in the victim’s mouth. The police investigate
more into the girl’s history, which leads
them to visit Taiwan to locate the girl’s
stepfather. The chase ends up being futile, though,
as the man is found dead, killed with a cell phone
clutched between his hands. However, it’s
soon revealed that these new victims have something
in common: coal dust lining each of their stomachs.
It’s also learned that Mimiko’s stepfather
had died years ago before she had. This leads
to the discovery that Mimiko was not the originator
of this trend in murders, as the police, along
with a girl named Kyoko Okudera who received one
of the cell phone calls, look to Taiwan to uncover
the truth.
Given the basic plot, I assume
it’s not hard to see how this movie could
easily go about rewriting events from the first.
To the second film’s credit, at least the
start is promising, with an eerie rain stricken
school that Rika, Mimiko’s younger sister,
is attending before the movie goes to establish
the main characters. Unfortunately, the quality
of the story quickly dips beyond this point, while
the opening stuff with Rika ends up being completely
unimportant, as it feels like it was slapped in
only to try and connect this movie just a little
more with its predecessor. It’s in this
regard that the movie really goes astray, as director
Renpei Tsukamoto and writer Miwako Daira seem
to want to produce their own unique horror movie
yet have to do so through the confines of a sequel
to an already existing franchise. The ending result
is that there are two “killers” running
around in this movie, both using the cell phone
“gimmick” from the first, and although
the movie stresses that this newer character,
Li Li, was the one who turned Mimiko into the
specter type being that people are familiar with,
the movie does very little to actually connect
the events. This creates for a sort of awkward
union, as both characters are huge threats to
the protagonists yet their never events collide
in any significant way. How could this have been
improved? Well personally I would have enjoyed
a confrontation sequence between the two little
girls, butcher knives vs. Li Li’s giant
needles, but that would probably have had many
rolling their eyes. In reality the story probably
would have been better had it simply focused just
on the new girl Li Li, or had not brought her
up at all and returned to exploring the exploits
of Mimiko. In fact, I would imagine that many
people were hoping for the latter, especially
after seeing Tsukamoto’s take on the series.
This second movie is setup where
the viewer is not meant to think too hard about
the proceeding events and how they figure in with
the story from the first film. Otherwise one would
be able to point out a wealth of plot holes established
by this film; however, the movie is contradictory
in this regard as One Missed Call 2’s
ending won’t make a lick of sense unless
one dissects the plots of both fairly thoroughly.
In doing so, there are a couple of things that
the viewer is going to have to simply ignore in
order for everything to fit. First off, one will
have to disregard the fact that there was actually
a back-story to the ring tone used in the series,
where it was taken from a doll that Mimiko’s
sister carried around of a popular contemporary
kids show. This is on account of it clashing with
the idea that Li Li was the original killer as
she would have been using the tune long before
meeting Mimiko, or even likely before the show
that it came from was created. Second off, and
probably the hardest for most to stomach, one
is also going to have to ignore the fact that
the viewer actually saw how Mimiko died in the
first movie, through an asthma attack after her
mother left with the injured Rika. This is because,
according to this film, her death was actually
from a run-in with Li Li.
Now, those wanting to avoid spoilers
from the ending should turn back at this point,
as one can’t really review the movie without
attempting to dissect this very confusing sequence.
Keeping the above things in mind, one should recall
that it was shown near the end of the first film
that Mimiko had the ability to possess the bodies
of her victims, which she did with Yumi. For this
film she attempts the trick again, this time killing
Kyoko and taking over her body. Of course this
raises a couple of problems, like that her corpse
is apparently still in the mine even though Mimiko
is supposed to be running around with it, which
was done simply so the police could have the dramatic
line about “do you know both of the bodies?”
to Kyoko. Ignoring this though, it would appear
that Takako has been doing Mimiko’s bidding
for the later part of the movie, but was hallucinating
so that she only saw what she wanted to, like
comforting Yuting when she was in fact killing
him. One would assume that Mimiko also did the
same thing to Motomiya before he died, which explains
how she got a call from the detective late in
the movie, even though he was already dead at
that point. The final moments of the film are
then Takako discovering all of this, seeing the
videotape of Yuting being killed with her holding
the knife and getting the call that Motomiya was,
in fact, dead. Why did she get to discover all
of this if Mimiko was in control of her body?
I would assume it was because Mimiko might just
be that twisted and wanted Takako to know the
truth, or, more likely, the writers just didn’t
think about it that hard.
To move away from the story a little,
although not to brighter aspects of the film,
the acting in the movie is also fairly horrendous
from start to finish. In fact, the only halfway
decent performance in the film is from Renji Ishibashi
as detective Motomiya, a holdover character from
the first movie, whose onscreen time is also very
minimal. The rest of the cast, although often
quite attractive, is much less adequate. The two
leads, Mimura as Kyoko Okudera and Yu Yoshizawa
as Naoto Sakurai, are particularly poor and lack
a degree of chemistry together that was needed
to make a lot of their scenes work. Asaka Seto,
who plays Takako Nozoe, is very cute, one can
give her that, but she also gives a pretty bad
performance. She just doesn’t really seem
to be giving much effort to her role, and her
sequences with Yuting Chen, played by Peter Ho,
make Mimura and Yoshizawa’s scenes together
seem almost award quality in contrast.
To be fair, though, the actors
don’t exactly get a lot to work with. While
Takashi Miike crafted credible college students
as his main characters, the sequel is left with
mostly shallow and unbelievable protagonists in
their place. The early sequences with the characters,
before the new string of deaths start to occur,
are kind of nice to see their interactions with
one another, but these sequences are very limited
as the killings pick up almost immediately. Once
this starts to occur, the movie introduces one
more main character in the form of detective Takako,
who has been working with Motomiya to try and
discover the truth behind the murders. Unfortunately,
the movie skimps on trying to better develop this
cast or give the audience any particular reason
to care for them. This ends up being particularly
fatal for the “romantic” sequences
between Kyoko Okudera and Naoto Sakurai as they
tend to ring hollow with the viewer and create
for a fairly awkward viewing experience. The movie
does provide a very minimal back-story for Takako,
where her twin sister was killed while they were
children after picking up a pay phone call and,
presumably, being murdered by whoever was on the
other line that night. Does this event have any
connection to the ones in this film? No, and the
film makes the point to stress this again and
again to the degree where one just wants to proclaim:
“look, we get it, unless there is actually
a connection that’s going to later be uncovered
(and there isn’t), there is no need to continuously
stress how these aren’t related.”
Clearly this is just intended to give Takako some
motivation as to why she should be as dedicated
to this case as she is, but the frequency that
the writing feels vindicated to mention it just
smacks of writer Daira himself feeling that it’s
a fairly weak character device. Some of the more
broad stereotypes in the genre are also in full
force here, and one will be hard pressed not to
laugh when the trio of main characters say “Let’s
Split (up)” and, not much later, “Wait
here.”
As for the music, composed by Koji
Endo, it’s mostly unnoticeable and a viewer
will be pretty stressed to recall even a single
theme from the film, or even if there was background
music at all, when the picture comes to an end.
Other productions values fare a little better,
though, with the special effects being fairly
good, minus Madoka’s “twisting”
death sequence, which is a fairly inadequate reproduction
of a similar murder in the first. The Taiwan location
stuff is also nice to see, as it spices things
up a little, along with the fairly creepy set
design for Mimiko’s step father’s
house, with all of the knives hanging from the
ceiling.
Overall, One Missed Call 2
is hardly a horrible entry in the Japanese horror
genre; in fact, it would have had potential as
a stand-alone movie about Li Li and her victims.
However, the film just doesn’t work as a
legitimate sequel to the first film, as it seems
to spit on the events of its predecessor at every
turn while also digging itself a five-foot grave
based on the plot holes produced from trying to
connect the two. One can only hope that the third
movie in the series fits into the overall storyline
better, although the new writing team certainly
has their work cut out for them after the plot
in this film.
|
(2/5)