Quantity over quality

Rating: 4/10 (25 January 2017)

"The Conjuring 2" is the sequel to "The Conjuring", a pretty successful horror film from 2013. The director and one of the many writers here is once again James Wan, a Malaysian filmmaker who truly made it big in Hollywood. But the title of my review also refers to him and his career a bit. He worked on "Saw, "Insidious", "Conjuring" and more horror films, so he is certainly one of the defining directors of the genre right now. But it seems as if he has sacrificed a great deal of creativity in case he ever had it. I personally was not a great fan of the first Conjuring movie and I am also not too big on this one here. The film itself is also where the title of my review applies. It is basically a summation of all kinds of elements used in all kinds of horror films in the past. Unseen danger. Very visible danger. Exorcist elements. Danger in the water. Children and women who get scared the hell out of them. Tough-ass male characters who want to fight the dark spirits at any cost etc.
The two protagonists are played by Farmiga and Wilson just like in the first film and this is basically another chapter to their profession. However, with Farmiga's character's reaction on some occasions, I truly wonder why she would work in a field like this and not do a quiet office job or so. Also the couple not only runs into scary nuns and dead senior characters that take control of little girls, but they also have to deal with people who criticize their profession and say it's all nonsense, which also does not make any sense overall. So yeah, this film is really packed, but sadly it's like a 100 puzzle parts and almost none of them fit together or result in a convincing overall outcome. In one scene, Farmiga's character is scared to death, in the next it seems like nothing could scare her at all. How is that even possibly. The weakest moment was maybe the (seemingly) self-sacrifice scene of the male protagonist towards the end, which was pretty cringeworthy honestly. I see almost no really creative element in this film here, which sucks a lot and hurts the viewing experience too. This is especially painful as this movie runs for a massive 2 hours and 15 minutes almost, extremely long and you could actually see it as a mini-series in 3 parts of 45 minutes if you wanted. If you add the first movie, you almost have a real mini-series in terms of the length of both films taken together and if they ever make a third film, which they probably will looking at the success of the first two and how Wan loves sequels, then more will be added. As for me, this second film was already one too many, maybe even the first. The performances are also all very generic and bring nothing great to the screen, just like the script. Don't watch.