Butler's Cinema Scene

“A QUIET PLACE PART II” My rating: B

97 minute | MPAA rating: PG-13

With only two directing credits under his belt, actor-turned-filmmaker John Krasinski has proven himself one of the brightest up-and-comers in cinema.

“A Quiet Place” and its just-released sequel, “A Quiet Place Part II” remind a bit of the Spielbergian splash made by “Jaws” more than four decades ago. Like that seagoing classic, Krasinski’s “monster” movies exhibit a Hitchcockian sense for building suspense.

They have their own look and — perhaps even more important for a franchise about eyeless aliens who use their ears to track human prey — their own sound.

And they effectively mine notions of family and parenthood, with a tiny clan battling indescribable horrors to survive.

“A Quiet Place Part II” is a generally enjoyable thrill ride, peppered with gotcha shock moments and performances that far exceed what we’ve come to expect from the horror genre.

Yet despite the many upsides of this sequel, I found myself a bit let down. Not by the execution, but by the sameness. Krasinski sticks with ideas he introduced in the first film, but I never felt he was advancing them so much as recycling them.

You’ll recall that Krasinki’s character Lee Abbott, died in the first film, sacrificing himself to save his children. The new film (the screenplay is credited to Krasinksi, Scott Beck and Bryan Woods) opens with a hugely effective flashback to the aliens’ arrival in the Abbott’s small upstate New York town. It’s got an impressive “War of the Worlds” vibe — and gives us our Krasinski fix before he vanishes from the screen for good.

Anyway, Lee’s widow Evelyn (Emily Blunt, aka Mrs. Krasinski) and surviving children — the hearing impaired Regan (Millicent Simmonds), the rather timorous Marcus (Noah Jupe) and their newborn daughter — decide to quit their farm refuge and seek other survivors.

They stumble across a neighbor, Emmett (Cillian Murphy) living in an abandoned foundry. Mourning the loss of his own children, Emmett is in survivalist/loner mode…he doesn’t want to be burdened with somebody else’s wife and kids.

To the extent that “Part II” has an emotional arc, it is slow reopening of Emmett’s stifled social impulses, especially when he is sucked into an expedition with Regan to the coast, where an offshore island is sending out a mysterious radio signal (Bobby Darin’s “Beyond the Sea,” played nonstop).

That and Regan’s growing independence. Young Miss Simmonds’ performance here is quite wonderful, a deaf action hero coming to grips with her own adolescent female empowerment. Not that anybody comments on those themes…they’re just there.

Basically the film’s second half cuts between two stories running on parallel tracks. On one Emmett and Regam experience numerous close calls as they work their way to the sea; back at the foundry Evelyn, Marcus and the baby hunker down in an old furnace and fend off attack after attack by hungry aliens.

There are some nifty set pieces here, and we get a better look at the uglies this time around, though Krasinski wisely knows not to dwell overmuch on these creatures; the unseen is always scarier.

Enjoyable? Yes. Deep? Not particularly.

But anyone who so obviously enjoys playing with the tools of filmmaking (Orson Welles’ famous “train set”) as Krasinki does undoubtedly will be turning his his attention to other ideas and stories in all sorts of genres.

I cannot wait.

| Robert W. Butler