P2 Review

Sometimes I watch a movie and I can’t help but think about the group of filmmakers that got together and discussed the idea for the film I am watching. They hired hundreds of actors, set designers, cameramen, make-up and wardrobe people, and spent hundreds of thousands of dollars and countless man hours to make the film, and what I am watching is the end result. I think about this the most when I see a truly horrible movie and it dumbfounds me. This is one of those movies.

P2 (2007) is a horror movie written by Alexandre Aja, Franck Khalfoun and Gregory Levasseur and directed by Franck Khalfoun. It stars Wes Bentley and Rachel Nichols. Angela (Nichols) gets stuck working late on Christmas Eve and is the last one to leave the building. When she realizes her car won’t start she enlists the help of the parking garage attendant Thomas (Bentley). He seems a little off and can’t help her so she decides to call a taxi, after rejecting Thomas’s offer to stay for dinner. She then finds herself locked in the parking garage and Thomas doesn’t seem quite right.

Okay, first of all, if you are going to make a thriller with just two characters, they have to be interesting. They have to have some kind of substance, and the actors have to make those characters believable so the audience can relate to them or understand their psychoses. None of that was happening here. What you had was just a boring story about two people I couldn’t care less about.

Now let's talk about the setting. Who thought a movie could survive 90 minutes in a place as bland and uninteresting as a parking garage? Seriously, it was hard to watch for this element alone. Another gray wall followed by another gray wall, nothing interesting whatsoever.

The acting was horrendous as well, but I can’t blame the actors, I feel like they really didn’t have a whole lot to work with. The character of Thomas could have been so much cooler and added some edge to the movie, but I feel like he just wasn’t believable because there wasn’t much character direction in the script. I have never seen Rachel Nichols before but I saw Wes Bentley in American Beauty which is a great movie, so I know he can act.

Believe me, I get no pleasure out of completely bashing a movie, but I feel I owe it to my readers to be honest. Some movies are just a waste of time and you just shouldn’t bother. This is one of them.

• This film had a budget of 8 million dollars and had a worldwide gross of 7.7 million dollars.
• P2 was released on November 9, 2007 was produced by P2 productions and distributed by Summit Entertainment.
• P2 was filmed in Canada.
• The film was shot in two months, exclusively at night, at a real working Toronto parking garage.
• There were 14 white dresses, each one in various stages of dirtiness and decay.
• Three different dogs were used to portray the Rottweiler.
• According to an interview he gave to the New York Times in 2010, this movie was made during the middle of Wes Bentley's decade long, extremely serious addiction to cocaine and heroin. He said he only accepted any movie roles during that time so that he would have money to buy drugs.