Bo-Ring

The Ring Two

Directed by Hideo Nakata

American suspense movies can't keep a straight face. They push your buttons and love it, and audiences love it, too; they seem to enjoy being scared over and over again in the same five or six ways. There's nothing wrong with self-awareness, especially if it's encoded in the filmmaking and expressed with wit. Steven Spielberg and Brian De Palma, for instance, often break the tension with visual jokes that say, "It's a movie." Think of the shot of the pursuing T-Rex in Jurassic Park reflected in a jeep's rearview mirror, above the words, "Caution: Objects in mirror are closer than they appear," or Frances Sternhagen's police psychiatrist in Raising Cain, making exposition "cinematic" by delivering it in one of cinema's longest, most hilariously complex tracking shots. But there's a difference between a movie that's clever (and aware of its cleverness) and a movie that mistakes Pavlovian brutishness for artistry, then invites the audience to laugh at itself for being gullible enough to play along. It's the difference between "What a great movie" and "It's only a movie."

The blockbuster horror sequel The Ring Two, in which returning star Naomi Watts plays reporter Rachel Keller, a woman trying to protect her son Aidan (David Dorfman) from evil, is a rare film that functions in both modes at once-and not too gracefully. It's by turns passionate and mechanical, serious and dumbass-jokey. One minute it's laying out real horror-suspense based on deep psychological and spiritual dread. The next minute it's content to be what I call a terror picture-a cinematic amusement-park ride built around fear of injury or death, like Wes Craven's Scream trilogy, which aimed to zap audiences with the usual cattle prods while its cast of postmodern-doodle characters kept a running commentary on genre cliché. The Ring 2 is a guaranteed blockbuster that will probably have been seen by millions by the time this review comes out, so in the interest of exploring this matter further, I'll set aside my usual hypersensitivity toward plot spoilers and ruin everything. (You've just been warned.)

The American remake of Ringu, directed by Gore Verbinski, was creepier and more elegant than the typical American horror blockbuster, but still not a patch on the Japanese original. Its cuts and compositions were serviceable rather than beautiful-a persistent problem in Verbinski's films-and it was self-conscious, sometimes almost campy, in a manner distinctive to Hollywood horror films of the post?Freddy Krueger era. You could see every scare and false scare coming; the movie seemed to know you could see it coming. Yet it still felt mildly fresh to viewers unfamiliar with Asian horror, which conflates technology and mysticism and favors atmosphere over answers.

The Ring Two is a much better movie, but it, too, is a victim of cross-cultural tension. The filmmaker is Hideo Nakata, director of the original Japanese series upon which this one is based. Nakata is one of the world's best and most widely imitated horror filmmakers-he has Jean Cocteau's eye and John Carpenter's sense of menace-and J-horror fans hoped he would infuse the American version of the series with the same sense of religious and philosophical unease that ruled the Japanese series. He succeeds, but only to a point; the lead-footed American way of making horror pictures keeps asserting itself throughout, trivializing any beauty or fear Nakata can generate.

The opening sequence, in which a young man who viewed a copy of the original's cursed videotape tries to pass the curse onto his girlfriend by convincing her to watch the tape as well, epitomizes Hollywood arrogance. It's essentially a coded celebration of the original's box-office success, and a blundering commentary on the contradictory responses called up by movie violence (the urge to look vs. the urge to hide one's eyes). It's clear from this opening that we're in the grip of a movie that intends to celebrate its movie-ness throughout without earning the right to such indulgence.

It's a textbook example of what Roger Ebert calls the Idiot Plot, wherein people do things that no thinking person would do, especially a person who'd survived the horrors of the first Ring. (Aidan specifically warns Rachel not to leave him alone, so of course she leaves him alone; Aidan warns Rachel that Samara, the little murdered girl from the first Ring, can hear every word they say unless they're asleep, yet Rachel continues to discuss important Samara-related business whenever the urge strikes.) This time it's hard to tell what connection, if any, Samara has with the videotape; like Freddy Krueger, she now seems to have the ability to be anywhere and do anything the plot requires.

Ehren Kruger's script-which bears little relation to Nakata's Japanese sequel-has Samara latching on to little Aidan to get closer to Rachel, who represents the loving mother Samara always wished she had. That's a promising notion. Even better is the scene where Aidan is possessed by Samara's spirit in the bathtub and Rachel comes to his rescue; Rachel's newspaper coworker (Simon Baker) witnesses their conversation, in which Aidan refers to his attacker in the third person, and assumes Rachel is a potential child-murderer herself-an assumption that causes a child psychiatrist (Elizabeth Perkins) to isolate Rachel from Aidan. Rachel's conviction that her boy is possessed by an evil spirit-a spirit that can only be driven out by an act of premeditated murder-evokes a long line of filicidal narratives, from Abraham and Medea through the Susan Smith case. It's a disturbing predicament, one that could have confounded notions of audience identification. We know Samara's ghost is real and a threat, and we know Rachel isn't insane, yet we still feel queasy rooting for her to drown Aidan. (The scene where Rachel tries to knock out the possessed Aidan by feeding him a tranquilizer-laced sandwich recalls a similar, revoltingly funny scene in Todd Solondz's Happiness.)

Between Samara's sympathetic impulses (she just wants a mommy) and Rachel's understandable need to drown her son (how else to drive out Samara?), it's hard not to sigh thinking about what Polanski might have done with similar material; the movie probably would have ended with Aidan dead at the bottom of a river and Rachel in prison, convinced she did the right thing while the viewer continued to wonder if the ghosts were just figments of her unhinged imagination. The spirit of De Palma threatens to intrude as well, announcing its presence indirectly (through steady, circling SteadiCam shots and mournful music) and directly (Carrie star Sissy Spacek's cameo as a mental patient). But The Ring Two lacks the courage to follow through on its darkest impulses.

Nakata's amazing eye and ear ensure that the movie's big sequences attain momentary power. The scene where Rachel discovers Samara's image embedded in Aidan's photographic self-portraits is eerily effective. And the extended sequence of Rachel preparing to drown her boy-complete with swelling, romantic, Pino Donaggio-ish orchestrations and a chilly God's eye view shot and an eerie angle looking up through the bottom of a filled tub-is close to brilliant. Nakata thinks in pictures-sometimes rhyming and near-rhyming pictures that lend The Ring Two an illusion of consistency and completeness. The film's many shots of mirrors, video screens, watery surfaces and extreme close-ups of eyeballs draw analogies between recording and reflection, and link cameras to eyes and video to human memory; they also suggest a tension between the knowable and unknowable (or rational and mystical) worlds, which in this movie are separated by the thinnest of membranes. When Rachel burns a copy of a ghost-possessed videotape under a bridge at night, there's a crescent moon in the sky above her shoulder; in the film's dream-world climax, Rachel and Samara climb out of a well toward a half-covered opening that masks the sunlight into an identical crescent shape.

These fine touches are wasted on The Ring Two, a lavish, star-driven movie that can't be truly upsetting for fear of killing the golden goose, the franchise. It's content to tease us. (You know Rachel will drown Aidan, but only for a second, and that the boy will be fine in the end.) Any hope that The Ring Two would allow itself to be taken over by the spirit of J-horror was sure to end in disappointment. Like little Aidan, the movie allows itself to be possessed only intermittently. Mommy Hollywood hovers nearby, prepared to drive the spirit out by any means necessary.