Insidious: Chapter 2 (2013) - James Wan

Picking up after the events of the first film, James Wan's Insidious: Chapter 2 finds the Lambert family trying to recover from their dangerous connection to the spirit world.  Renai is trying her best to move on from he life but she can't help but notice that something seems off about her husband, Josh.  Insidious: Chapter 2 is a very stylized horror film, which you would expect from James Wan, but his aesthetic is growing quite tiresome.  It could be due to the fact that another one of his films, The Conjuring, came out so close to this film's release but the whole look and feel of Insidious 2 comes off feeling generic and stale.  The narrative of Insidious 2 is subpar, taking the twist ending of the first film and essentially extending it into a two hour feature film.  For large stretches I found the whole thing terribly uninteresting with no real mystery or intrigue that made the first film such a pleasant surprise.  What is also strange is how unnecessarily convoluted the whole film becomes, almost as if they are trying to manufacture some type of intrigue in an otherwise simple story.  All of this being said, the reason one sees a film like this is to be frightened and unfortunately Insidious: Chapter 2 is severely lacking.  Outside of a few weak jump scares the film lacks any type of tension or horror.  What made Insidious so fun was its somewhat original ideas and sense of humor but Insidious 2 just feels like a studio money grab, lacking almost everything that made the first film memorable.
4/10

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