Movie Review for P2

The Horrors of Parking

by Philbert Ortiz Dy
posted on Wednesday, February 20, 2008 in Movie Reviews

How much horror can one derive from a parking building? Not much, really. In P2, it becomes pretty obvious rather quickly that we just aren’t going to see anything we haven’t seen before. Still, this film has its charms, managing to do a whole lot with what little it’s got. While it’s no masterpiece of horror filmmaking, P2 isn’t half-bad.

It’s Christmas Eve. Angela is running late for her family’s Christmas party, but she has work to finish. She’s the last one to leave the building. She finds, however, that her car won’t start, and that the building seems to be entirely locked down. Tom, the parking garage security guard, appears to help her at first, but turns out to be a sociopath on keeping Angela trapped in the garage with him. Angela must use her wits to try to survive and defeat her psychotic captor.

A parking garage is kind of an interesting setting for a horror/thriller, providing some very familiar fears for some people. It turns out, however, that there isn’t a whole lot you can do in a parking garage. The film quickly loses steam as the character is left just doing the same thing over and over, running from one level to the next. The environment gets real old real quick, as we find ourselves in the same locations over and over, curtailing the overall tension. The film is also undermined by a tremendously large plot hole: any building should have fire alarms, and our heroine should have pulled one right away. People will argue that there would’ve been no film if she did this, but this could have been easily addressed with a quick scene showing our villain disabling the fire alarm or something. This plot hole can really rob one’s suspension of disbelief.

Despite that, though, the filmmakers’ craft is pretty evident. What little they do get to do, they do it pretty well. The violence is grisly, and the scenes are all set up pretty well. The film trumps any other recent film in the genre by virtue of its filmmaking alone. The filmmakers don’t rely too much on the cheap and easy horror tricks that often take the place of logic and scene-building in films like these. They deserve to be commended for that. If they had just found more things to do in that garage, this could’ve been a quick cult classic.

Rachel Nichols is pretty good in the lead role. Angela is a superior horror movie heroine, one who doesn’t make a lot of boneheaded choices. Nichols manages to carry that intelligence, and she’s quick to gain the audience’s sympathy. Wes Bentley is kind of over-the-top as Tom, the psychotic security guard, but he mostly gets the point across. The script has him saying some pretty silly things, but his commitment gets the lines over.

P2 is all right. In terms of horror filmmaking, it gets a lot of things right. Still, the overall weakness of the setting and the lack of anything new to offer really do hurt the film. It’s kind of a shame really. The talent is obviously there, but they got so tied down to the concept that they were all held back. In the end, it’s just a parking garage, and it’s just not enough.

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