Movie Review: 'A Quiet Place: Part 2' is EXHAUSTING

I didn’t enjoy A Quiet Place Part 2, I endured it. John Krasinski’s budding horror franchise is utterly exhausting. I understand that tension is the bread and butter of this premise but at a certain point my excitement during A Quiet Place Part 2 morphed into the kind of feeling one has during a rigorous workout with a tyrannical trainer, I appreciate the necessity but I just want this to be over as soon as possible. Some will call it effective, I don’t entirely disagree with that notion. But I don’t think a feeling of weary relief that I can now go home is what the movie is intending.

A Quiet Place Part 2 takes us back before aliens burned from the sky and began consuming anything that they could hear. We begin on John Krasinski’s Lee in the precious months before he gets eaten in the original story. Lee sees the first signs of something awful about to happen in television reports but assumes it’s a big city problem. He’s on his way to his son’s,Marcus (Noah Jupe), baseball game where his wife, Evelyn (Emily Blunt), and daughter, Regan (Millicent Simmonds), are waiting for him.

Then it happens, fire in the sky, and aliens begin to hit the ground. Chaos ensues and we see a glimpse of how the family learned that silence was the key to keeping the aliens at bay. Smash cut to the future, day 461. Lee is dead, his family home is mostly destroyed, but Evelyn, Regan and Marcus have found a way to incapacitate the alien creatures. Using feedback from Regan’s hearing aid, they’ve found a sound that slows the aliens down long enough to shoot them in the brain.

With this new knowledge in hand they set out to find other survivors. Along for the ride is Evelyn’s new baby, carried precariously in a box rigged with an air supply so that if the baby cries, it won’t be heard. Things on this journey naturally go wrong very quickly. The first survivor they find has rigged his area with a series of traps intended to keep the aliens at bay but they work on anyone who might get close. First, there’s a tripwire that sets off a loud noise allowing the alien the chance to kill. Then, as if being under attack wasn’t enough, Marcus hits another trap, a bear trap, which nearly breaks his leg.

The unyielding series of obstacles Krasinski, who also took up the writing credit on A Quiet Place Part 2, are truly the source of the exhaustion caused by A Quiet Place Part 2. At a certain point, the odds stacked against the survival of our central cast become so overwhelming that it’s hard to invest in the idea that they could actually survive. Krasinski has crafted the mousetrap here in such a fashion that it drains all hope and thus even if you believed survival were possible, what would be the point to a life of constant, unending fear and silent running?

Cillian Murphy has joined the cast for this sequel, a former friend of the family turned hermit after his family were killed by the aliens. He’s the one responsible for the traps but he also becomes an ally and a friend. Murphy’s performance is thoroughly professional, he’s a terrific actor and an asset to any movie he’s in. That said, the best thing about his performance here is a neat seemingly unplanned call back to his 28 Days Later, a similarly grim and hopeless dystopian horror that was, at least more artful in exhausting the audience than this more popcorn styled adventure.

There is nothing awful about A Quiet Place Part 2, it’s merely just tiresome. The over stacked odds, the distinct lack of hope, I won’t comment on the ending aside from saying another sequel seems possible, the whole thing just wore me out. Maybe if I were 20 years younger, I’m only 45, I wouldn’t be so tired but I have seen way too many dystopian movies and A Quiet Place Part 2 doesn’t do anything special compared to so many other, similar movies. When the most notable feeling a movie engenders is enervation and a distinct feeling of wanting to leave and forget it ever happened, that’s not a great movie experience.