Flasz On Film

Like night that follows day, a sequel will follow when any movie makes twenty-one million dollars against a budget of just three. It’s one of the ancient, unperturbable and unyielding laws of Hollywood. You strike when the iron’s hot. You follow up a jab with a hook to the liver. You double down. And it’s completely irrelevant that a movie you’re attempting to turn into a franchise didn’t even prescribe a scintilla of narrative wedge space for it. 

Because how exactly are you supposed to turn a movie like Fall into a franchise? How do you follow it up? You just took two characters up a broadcasting tower, killed one and turned the other one into an emotional wreck after surviving this ordeal and now that you’ve made a metric shit-tonne of money you think this is tantamount to a public endorsement of a franchise to be greenlit and dispatched to our screens. Well, let me remind you that for all the exhilaration stemming from a handful of its key sequences, Fall was nothing but a parade of narrative clichés that barely held together when witnessed in a theatrical setting and completely fell apart upon revisit in a more domestic environment where the wow factor of a massive screen hosting these frequent wide-angle shots was no longer there to ensure the rapid onset of sympathetic acrophobia. 

Nevertheless, four years on we have landed ourselves in a situation where Fall 2 is a movie that exists (and in American markets it is festooned with a post-colon subtitle Deadpoint which means exactly sod-all) and we are officially witnessing it becoming a franchise. We briefly forget about Becky, the sole survivor of the previous movie, and we hitch our cart to Jax (Harriet Slater) who is the younger sister of Shiloh, Becky’s obnoxious daredevil friend played by Virginia Gardner. Shiloh’s old friend Luce (Arsema Thomas) turns up on Jax’s doorstep and as they rifle through Shiloh’s box of stuff that’s so cliché that even Bob Zemeckis would have cringed and writhed, they find her perfectly production-designed scrapbook of daredevil ideas complete with cryptic quotes, newspaper clippings, heart stickers and the like. In there, they discover that after the broadcasting tower stunt that claimed her life, Shiloh was planning to go to Thailand to do a deadly plank walk circumventing an insanely vertical mountain and they figure that in order to get over their grief they need to go to Thailand and do the plank walk themselves. Fifty shades of stupid. 

So they do. An obligatory postcard montage of Hey-we’re-in-Thailand follows, whose only saving grace is that it reminded me I should rewatch Danny Boyle’s The Beach, and after a string of braindead conveniences we are up there climbing together with the girls and their hot-blooded and mysteriously dark guide Jon (Tom Brittney). You can figure out the rest. Stuff happens, the girls get stranded, one of them gets injured but nothing’s sufficiently gory to make the movie abandon its PG-13 rating; and we sit there with them as they improvise a way down that doesn’t involve falling to their deaths like sacks of mince. 

Done. Ninety minutes pass and you are free to go thinking that you somehow wasted this time because nothing of value ever happened to you, no brain cell was ever engaged to an appreciable extent and as far as exhilaration factor goes, the movie looked as though it left its excitement on the kitchen counter at home while it was scrambling out the door to make in time for the showing. The only residual outcome Fall 2 might engender is that it will now ensure that Fall becomes a franchise; after all, we are now aware of the existence of Shiloh’s scrapbook of stunt ideas so brace yourselves for the arrival of the Falluverse built in the image of the shared universe engineered around the room of demonic knickknacks and haunted tchotchkes in the house of Lorraine and Ed Warrens. Every page in Shiloh’s scrapbook is a potential movie, which is more of a threat than a promise. A pattern has been established where Scott Mann (who wrote and directed the first movie and co-wrote this one) writes a script around the idea of getting stranded somewhere remote, a jobber-director (or directors, like The Spierig Brothers who helmed this here calamity) is hired, the production team goes on holiday to shoot a bunch of coverage of inaccessible wilderness and then, in front of a green screen, the movie would shoot its more visually daring sequences. Bob’s your uncle. Bonus points if we can tangentially connect the movie to the set of original characters, thus turning this whole thing into a saga and planting seeds for a potential legacy sequel twenty-five years from now… which is exactly what Fall 2 does in its closing moments anyway. 

Suffice it to say that Fall 2 is not a good movie. In fact, it is pretty much the polar opposite of a good movie and it isn’t even because it is so terminally braindead that it hurts to watch it. Far from it. I’ll happily switch off my cognitive apparatus while experiencing a movie, but I have to be asked to switch something else on instead. I can’t just sit there like an unpowered tin man; a movie has to give me something: visceral entertainment, emotional catharsis, a Mars bar or an awkward back rub. Anything, really. 

Sadly, Fall 2 didn’t give me anything I could latch onto, let alone take home. It was an experience in looking at images and wondering how nobody had the wherewithal to step in and ask if the money they were burning in pursuit of making this movie was providing any calories whatsoever. It was a movie that wasn’t fun enough to be this stupid, which is something any half-decent B-movie filmmaker either instinctively knows or learns the hard way. So, let it be a lesson to everyone responsible for putting this travesty together: make your movie as dumb as you want or humanly can, but give me something in return if you want me to become your Fall-o-wer.