The best advice I can offer regarding this “Ring” is don’t answer it. When movies make oodles of money like the first film did, sequels happen. Occasionally, they’re decent. But this, like so many other horror-genre follow-ups before it, is not one of those occasions. Samara, the scraggly haired creepy-crawler who terrorizes those unfortunate enough not to have upgraded to DVD is back, but this time the chill is gone and its stead is silliness of blockbuster proportions. The only thing remotely frightening about this tensionless sequel is the filmmakers’ arrant disregard for its audience’s intelligence.
Picking up six months from where the first film ended, Rachel Keller (Naomi Watts) and her perpetually creepy kid Aidan (David Dorfman) have relocated from Seattle to a sleepy seaside community in Oregon. Rachel takes a job as an editor at a local newspaper where apparently neither editing nor doing much of anything is in her job description. She, like this movie, simply doesn’t work — the office exists solely for the purpose of introducing the male lead, hunky newspaper owner Max Rourke (Simon Baker of TV’s “The Guardian”). From the get-go, abject laziness is apparent. Rather than cleverly negotiate obstacles in the story’s terrain, screenwriter Ehren Kruger and director Hideo Nakata (taking over for Gore Verbinski) simply eliminate them out of hand. After a teenager is killed in Samara-like fashion, Rachel rushes to the scene to have a peek at the body, which conveniently is left unattended in an ambulance. Then it’s off to the police station to question a witness who is also readily available, sitting alone in a waiting area. Finally, Rachel heads back to the crime scene to find it — tada! — completely deserted. No cops, no gawkers, no press. There isn’t even any yellow tape. Couldn’t they at least have gotten some yellow tape for verisimilitude? Sheesh! All of this within the film’s first 15 minutes … and it only gets sloppier from there.
To her credit, Watts somehow manages to act scared when her car is attacked by — get this — a pack of angry deer, and she doesn’t betray even a hint of doubt in the dubious wisdom of going back to her ghost-infested abode “to pick up some things” before moving on to whatever town “Ring 3” is going to be set in. (Rated PG-13 for violence/terror, disturbing images, thematic elements and some language. Running time: 111)
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on March 18, 2005. Read the original PDF.