20150801: Thriller Review--American Psycho 2

American Psycho 2: All American Girl

1. Fundamentals.
1. Title: American Psycho 2: All American Girl
2. IMDb: Users rated this 3.9/10 (11,673 votes)
3. Rotten Tomatoes:
   Tomatometer: 11% based on 9 reviews
   18% of viewers liked it, based on 25,215ratings
   Critics Consensus:No consensus yet.


4. Status: Released
5. Release date: 2002-04-22
6. Production Companies: Lions Gate Films
7. Tagline: Angrier. Deadlier. Sexier.


8. Budget:  10,000,000 USD
9. Revenue: Revenue figures not available at review time.
10. Runtime: 88 minutes.
11. Genres: Horror, Thriller


12. Directed by: Morgan J. Freeman.  Written by: Alex Sanger, Karen Craig


13. Starring: Mila Kunis as Rachael, William Shatner as Starkman, Geraint Wyn Davies as Daniels, Robin Dunne as Brian, Lindy Booth as Cassandra, Charles Officer as Keith Lawson, Jenna Perry as Young Rachael, Michael Kremko as Patrick Bateman, Kim Poirier as Barbara, Boyd Banks as Jim


14. TMDb overview: Rachel is a criminology student hoping to land a position as a teacher's assistant for professor Robert Starkman. She's sure this position will pave the way to an FBI career, and she's willing to do anything to obtain it -- including killing her classmates. The school psychiatrist, Dr. Daniels, becomes aware that Rachel is insane, but Rachel is skilled at her dangerous game of death and identity theft.


2. Setup and Plot


1. There is a lot of voiceover toward the front end of the film, and voiceover later on.  This is usually a sign of not enough attention being paid to developing the screenplay.


2. Rachel has, for good reasons, more than a bit of a fixation on Patrick Bateman from the first American Psycho film.  When she reaches university, she wants to be the assistant of Robert Starkman, a former FBI profiler renowned for catching serial killers.  She wants to know everything he can possibly teach her.  The assistant position would also likely mean she would get a choice entry into training at Quantico.


3. She has some competition for the position, though.  What is the movie about?  It's about whether or not anyone catches up to the extraordinary methods that she used to eliminate the competition.


3. Conclusions
1. One line summary: Essentially a non-sequel despite the name.


2. Three stars of five.


4. Scores
1. Cinematography: 6/10 The visual quality of the version that Netflix screened was not all that good.  The usage of camera was all rather pedestrian as well.


2. Sound: 6/10 I could hear the dialog.  The sound mixing strongly favoured the background music over the spoken voices, however.  The choice of background music was not the film's strong point.


3. Acting: 6/10 American Psycho II, filmed just outside Toronto, made me appreciate the cast in American Psycho I just a bit more.  I like Canadian actors William Shatner (Star Trek), Robin Dunne (Sanctuary), Geraint Wyn Davies (Forever Knight), and Lindy Booth (The Librarians, Dawn of the Dead [2004]).  However, I like them in sci-fi television for the most part.  Their performances in a psychological thriller were a bit unexpected.  Davies and Shatner were fine, but the scenes with only Dunne and Kunis were not the best.  On the other hand, the scenes with only Davies and Kunis were engaging.


4. Screenplay: 5/10 The large percentage of voiceover was not a plus. The badly written dialog featuring Kunis or Dunne was quite off-putting.  Still, the film had a beginning, a middle, and an end, with reasonable connections from scene to scene.