Don’t Breathe 2 Parent Guide

Although he had a successful career as a Navy SEAL in his youth, Norman (Stephen Lang) has lost his sight and spends almost all his time at home. But blindness does not mean helplessness, as some foolhardy burglars learned a few years ago. Now, Norman is raising a young girl named Phoenix (Madelyn Grace), who he’s teaching to be self-reliant and dangerous. All that training is about to come in handy, as a mysterious group of armed men has just broken in, seemingly determined to take Phoenix with them… but Norman isn’t about to let that happen.

While I expect that this title was meant to imply terror-induced breathlessness, I believe I actually stopped breathing several times in this film because I was so bored I forgot I was alive. This movie is so blandly mediocre, so unsubtly derivative, so catastrophically disinteresting that I think I was more concerned about the infinitesimal progress of a hangnail than anything occurring on screen.

At only 98 minutes, you’d think that this film has the advantage of brevity. It doesn’t. There’s maybe 40 minutes worth of plot here, and the remaining 58 are filled with dark shots of people’s shoes treading on a variety of floors. The result is that the movie gives the impression of running somewhere between eight hours and eternity.

Of course, in those 40 minutes, there’s plenty to keep family audiences away. While this film manages to avoid shoving a turkey baster full of semen into anyone’s throat (à la Don’t Breathe), I was too busy trying to stay awake to be grateful. There’s still the usual horror mess – burned bodies, eyeball gouging, stabbings, shootings, and a charming scene featuring a child trying to hack the hand off a corpse with a machete. Lovely.

Don’t Breathe 2 is dark, and not just tonally. It’s genuinely difficult to see what’s happening at any given time, which only adds to the boredom. I think I would have preferred it to be even darker – just a black screen would have been alright with me. Cut out the audio too and you’ve got a much better film. But since director Rodo Sayagues didn’t do that, the kindest thing I can say is that, eventually, the credits rolled and I got to leave – the film isn’t actually interminable, it just feels that way.