Starring:

Directed by: Franck Khalfoun

P2 Productions

The Official Site of P2

Discuss P2 on the boards!

I accidentally saw P2 today. How do you accidentally see a movie? Easy, you go to the wrong theater expecting to see Vince Vaughn tossing midgets and settle on whatever's playing next that you haven't seen yet. Believe it or not this has happened to me a couple times before. There are two AMC theaters within about 12 blocks of each other and I've gotten them mixed up at least 3 times now. For the most part they play the same movies, but every now and then one will carry something specific or the start times won't match up and I find myself either booking north as fast as I can or settling on watching Wes Bentley ruin his career. It was early. I didn't feel like running.

After seeing P2 though I realized I should have paid for a cab. The 7-dollar fare uptown would have saved me a lot of grief over this holiday horror mess that makes Black Christmas’ inbred, jaundice, cookie cannibal seem like a interesting idea.

It would be one thing if the film were scary. Black Christmas had me clutching my armrest and walking cautiously to my car, but on the holiday freak out scale P2 ranks a lot closer to White Christmas than Black Christmas. Hell, it's not even as scary as It's a Wonderful Life. At least that had a ghost in it.

The scariest thing to me about P2 is this. I left my hat in the theater. You know, the hat I wear in 80% of the comics including the one you just read, and that I've lovingly worn since 8th grade. 2 blocks from the theater the winter breeze on my bare head wakes me from my awful-movie-coma and sends me racing back to the theater. At no point during the movie did I feel the rush of adrenaline I felt in the run back, as I was talking my way back into the theater, or at the moment I spotted the hat tucked in the folded seat next to where I'd been sitting. What a relief. My filthy trademark is back on my head, and this horrible movie is behind me.

Still, four paragraphs in, some of you don't even know what movie I'm talking about. While P2 got steady commercial play over the past few weeks, in the post DVR world of fast forwarding through the garbage, it could have easily been missed. For the record, P2 is about an overworked business woman (Rachel Nichols) who leaves work a little too late on Christmas Eve only to be trapped in the parking deck by an obsessive parking lot security guard (Bentley).

The movie makes up for its watered-down scares with the performances from these two actors. As the only two with more than 6 lines, the movie depends on them being able to hold things together, something tough when you realize there's not really that much that can be done when the stage for your little play is four identical concrete floors and an elevator. First time director Franck Khalfoun, who also co-wrote thee film, gets the most he can out of this light premise but you can only take it so far.

Like I said - the performances are the strongest thing here. Bentley's character Tom has an eerie Norman Bates quality to him without a big twist waiting in the wings. How lame would Norman have been if he weren’t pretending to be his mother? He’d just be creepy. Well “creepy� fits Thomas the parking lot security guard pretty well. I recently went back and watched Ghost Rider, Bentley's big scene-chewing return to the silver screen, and while P2 will make far less money and be quickly forgotten, when his acting is concerned it's a step in the right direction.

The object of his affection I didn't recognize at first, but it turned out to be Rachel Nichols from Alias and the short-lived drama Invasion. I haven't seen her in much else but I'll always remember her as the new secret agent gorgeous enough to distract me from Jennifer Garner's classic beauty. She was doing something right then, as she is now, but that thing is not picking projects. It's nice to see her featured on the big screen after taking backseats in remakes (the Amityville Horror) and unwarranted sequels (Dumb and Dumberer), but gaining the spotlight in P2 will do nothing for her career but get her more of the same.

Of course it's more likely that no one will bother seeing the movie at all, which is just as well. The performances are there, but in a horror movie with no horror you could have Meryl Streep and Brando's Ghost at the top of their game and it still wouldn't matter if the essentials of the genre are this far off the mark.

It's disappointing. So much so that in you're mad dash to leave early, you'll probably forget your hat too. Head back and hope that by the time you've gotten there the credits have rolled.

Rating: 3 out of 10 - I’m not especially afraid of parking lots, but my wife couldn't disagree with me more. She normally will brush me off when I invite her to see a horror movie. She'll call me silly and just laugh. But after describing the plot of P2 she gave me a good talk about how terrifying parking lots can be. You never know who's down there or what's waiting around the corner… It's a secluded area that invites danger and they freak her out. So there is a target audience out there for P2. They're just too afraid to watch scary movies.

No way. I’m sure some people will pick it up. Bentley fans that can’t let his dreamy perceptive bag boy character from American Beauty go, Rachel Nichols pervs looking for their fix, and fans of watered-down gimmicky horror flicks who will proudly put P2 on their shelf somewhere between Turistas and Stay Alive.

Of course I’m sure that there’s some alternate reality version of myself that found Freddy Cougar before Wolverine that is making the same crack at a guy like me who will proudly rest an adapted disaster like Fantastic Four between The Punisher and Daredevil. To each his own.

When I got back to work from seeing the movie I wrote down my initial reaction, which included the story with the hat, and a good chunk of what made it into the introduction for the review. The primary reaction I got to this personal anecdote related to seeing P2 was, “What the hell is P2?�

Before I even had a chance to Google the official site, to my rescue came Sean (opie301 on the boards) who linked to the IMDB page, gave a brief synopsis and his own interpretation to what it really means. From his first post here you can see today’s comic unfold throughout the posts in the thread. It was awesome because I seriously had no idea what I was going to do before that. The lead contender was seriously a joke about how they can’t make any sequels because the original is already called P�2�. So let’s all thank Sean for his inspiring comments and saving us the pain of… whatever THAT would have turned out to be.

Awake - Ugggghhh… this movie freaks me out to no end. Awake builds its story off a frightful premise inspired by a real life, unavoidable problem that could happen to anyone. It's rare but in some cases, when people are put under anesthetic they're body only appears to take to the medicine even though they remain awake and can feel everything that happens. Everything. "Heart surgery" everything.

Can you imagine being awake for hours on the operating table not being able to communicate what you're going through? That's only the background to Awake where Hayden Christensen's character learns about a plot to have him killed. It's an original way to learn a secret, that's for sure, but it is the device used to get the story rolling that truly terrifies me.

The film itself looks promising and it'll be really cool over the next few months to see if Christensen can break his Skywalker roots with two major releases in Awake and Jumper. Mark Hamill was unable to really take off after playing Luke for 6 years and I'd always wondered if the same fate would befall young Vader. So much was made of how wooden Christensen was in the Star Wars films but anyone that has seen Shattered Glass knows he can act. The pressure of playing an icon can get to anyone I suppose.

Well I hope everyone's week is going well. I'm doing fine. I've got a guest comic going up over at Dueling Analogs either Thursday or Friday of this week. It was so awesome to do a video gamed based comic. It made me realize how much I'm limiting myself with the movie theme.

Like I said, I'm not sure which day my strip is going up, but check both. And while you're there scroll back through the awesome guest week that Steve has set up to celebrate DA's two year anniversary!

That's it for now but I'm gearing up for Beowulf the reviews are so strong, I can't wait to see if it holds up to the hype. As long as they don't look like animated plastic zombies.