Movie Review: Ugly and Insipid 'Don't Breathe 2' Didn't Need to Exist

Don’t Breathe 2 begins from the flawed premise that the serial murderer and rapist at the center of the first film can somehow be rehabbed into an anti-hero. Stephen Lang’s ‘The Blind Man’ murdered teenagers who simply wandered into the wrong house looking to steal something, yes, and then they stumbled into his rape room. To say as a filmmaker that you want to further explore this character but from the perspective of a hero is strange to say the least and misguided at best.

Don’t Breathe 2 sees former Navy Seal Norman Nordstrom, aka ‘The Blind Man,’ find a small girl lying face down in the road. The girl is a survivor of a fire at a local meth lab run by her parents. Norman scoops the little girl up and takes her home. Instead of contacting the police, Norman decides to raise the girl himself. Naming her Phoenix, Norman spends the next 8 years training Phoenix for survival.

Now 12 years old, Phoenix, played by Madelyn Grace, is next seen running through the woods. She’s being chased by a very angry Rottweiler. She manages to escape over a fence, narrowly avoiding a bite from the powerful pup. Then, Phoenix sees a broken down vehicle and inside is a bag with a gun sticking out. She approaches and takes the gun. Soon after however, a man steps into the frame and takes the gun from her hand, it’s Norman and he says that she failed this test.

Survival training is part of a homeschooling program Norman invented himself in order to keep Phoenix from being found by the authorities. She doesn’t know that Norman isn’t her father. Taking her to school might cause that information to get out. On top of that, the girl’s real parents might have survived that meth lab explosion and come looking for their little girl. Indeed, that’s the plot of the rest of Don’t Breathe 2.

On a rare excursion into the nearby town, accompanying Norman’s business partner, Hernandez, played by Stephanie Arcila, to deliver plants Norman cultivates at their home, Phoenix is discovered by Raylan (Brenden Sexton III), her real father. He’s just been released from jail and by happenstance caught sight of Phoenix and her shock of white hair amidst her otherwise auburn locks. He trails her to a gas station and hears her singing a song that she claims her mother used to sing and Raylan’s suspicions about the girl are confirmed.

Following Hernandez when she takes Phoenix home that evening, Raylan soon arrives with thugs in tow. Said thugs are told to enter the home, take the girl and kill anyone who is in the house. Little do they know that Norman is a violent psychopath with Seal training and though blind, a keen sense for danger and close combat. The home invasion doesn’t go well, Phoenix uses her training to elude her captors while Norman works to incapacitate baddies left and right.

One of the few slight variations from classic thriller and horror tropes is that Norman doesn’t appear to want to kill these thugs immediately and several of the thugs appear to have strong instinct for survival, until the plot needs them to die. Raylan is even shown as an equal to The Blind Man in his nasty, violent, will to live. Their head to head battle makes up the remaining runtime of Don’t Breathe 2 and while it’s plenty bloody and violent, it’s directed in deep darkness to hide how otherwise unremarkable these fight scenes are.

The real star of Don’t Breathe 2 is a claw hammer. One of thugs has a claw hammer as his weapon of choice and it is given a better establishing shot and more favorable lighting and direction than any of the actors in Don’t Breathe 2. The director seems to have loved the idea of this hammer slamming into skulls, sticking, and having to be pried out of body parts. It’s the one part of the movie that the director appears eager to show us.

Don’t Breathe 2 is clumsy, lazy, and ugly. It holds no appeal in terms of character, story, suspense or even basic film language. There is nothing appealing about this movie aside from young Madelyn Grace but since she is merely a prop in a child in danger plot, she could have been played by the wooden doll from Leos Carax’s recent film Annette and had the same emotional impact.

Don’t Breathe 2 arrived in theaters on August 13th, 2021.