P2; Finishing the Game

P2 (Franck Khalfoun, 2007) - C+

Aggressively insecure villains in horror movies are hard, because they tend not to be terribly menacing, and there's usually not much satisfaction in seeing them dispatched. Wes Bentley busts out a pretty generic, dimestore crazy here, and Rachel Nichols makes for a pretty boring woman in trouble; the concept, on the other hand, is nifty and simple -- those underground parking garages can be pretty creepy in the off hours, can't they? Bottom line, then, is that there's some suspense but not much catharsis -- the heroine is nowhere near aggressive enough until the very end, and the villain is never really that scary, since he's really just a shrimpy guy with some keycards, handcuffs, and a mean dog. Profoundly unremarkable and instantly forgettable, though Khalfoun's peers should take note of the good, judicious use of gore here; it really is so much more effective when it can surprise you.

Finishing the Game: The Search for a New Bruce Lee (Justin Lin, 2007) - B

Even when it's trite, it's bizarrely so -- e.g. we get the lily-white guy who insists that he is half-Chinese and writes turgid poems about the oppression of the yellow man in America, but then we see his mother and it turns out he really is half-Chinese; the casting director has a prototypical Christopher Guest vibe -- unshakeable confidence + complete incompetence -- but then the movie gives her an inexplicable crush on a comically average-looking Asian dude. Generally very sharp and self-aware (the boom mike joke toward the end had me rolling), but weird enough to be interesting even when the gags veer toward the cheap and easy. People seem to really dislike this, and I can't figure out why; I suspect anti-Asian bigotry.