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Bonk
Aug 4, 2002

Douche Baggins
Direct-to-DVD sequel to Donnie Darko, pretty much what you probably think: It’s everything a sequel should be for a movie that shouldn’t under any circumstances have a sequel. By that I mean, imagine someone is telling you in-depth about Donnie Darko, but he forgets a bunch of the key elements and isn't as good of a storyteller as the source material, so he’s making up the rest as he goes along and ends up with something that has no real functional purpose.

The “lore”, I guess you’d call it, is pretty internally consistent, in that it doesn’t really break the theme of anything that happened in the original. The writer did his homework, but what he didn't do is present anything new of substance. It comes off like Donnie Darko fan fiction, because that’s exactly what it is; Richard Kelly had nothing to do with the making of it, nor did he want to.

Samantha "What's a fuckass?" Darko, the little sister from the first movie (the role reprised by a now-18 Daveigh Chase, in case you needed to feel old today) and her friend are on a road trip when they break down in a small town full of one-dimensional characters that aren’t nearly as cleverly written as the quirky minor roles in the first one. Sam broods a lot and sleepwalks like her brother, which gives the director an excuse to keep her in tank tops and short-shorts. Then she starts seeing weird poo poo, and other weird poo poo happens, and other people see weird poo poo, and more weird poo poo happens, and the whole movie is full of weird poo poo.

It’s not all that bad of a script through most of the movie (a better cast could’ve made it a lot more interesting), but it suffers when it tries to wedge in as many themes and visual cues to the original as possible, only making them slightly different enough that it appears more as an homage than as a direct ripoff. But then in the final act it seems like it realizes this mistake and crams in a ton of bizarre symbolism to (over)compensate, most of which is unexplained and simply isn’t interesting enough to dig deeper into what it represents.

The bottom line is squandered potential. It has a lot of good elements that would've worked in more capable hands. It could have built upon the original if it were an "official" followup, but that wasn't really an option. It should have treaded into wholly original territory with only a few tenuous links, if it wanted to be a good story. But it didn’t, and it isn’t.

2/5

Bonk fucked around with this message at 18:01 on May 3, 2009

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