Worth: $16.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Emily Blunt, Cillian Murphy, Millicent Simmonds, Noah Jupe, John Krasinski, Djimon Hounsou
Intro:
…Krasinski’s taut direction here is the true star, as time and time again he shuffles the elements and delivers new, clever set pieces.
A Quiet Place was one of 2018’s more impressive genre flicks, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it was impressive because it showcased the rock-solid filmmaking chops of actor/director John Krasinski (aka Jim from The Office). Secondly, the film managed to get a modern cinema audience – that slack-jawed cadre of mouth-breathing noise machines – to shut their gobs for 90 entire minutes and drink in the well-crafted, suspenseful yarn on screen.
Audiences loved it. Critics (mostly) loved it and a sequel was pretty much guaranteed. A Quiet Place Part II was actually scheduled for release early in 2020 but that whole global pandemic situation put the kibosh on that release date something severe. Good news? It’s now coming out for real. The better news? It’s pretty bloody good!
A Quiet Place Part II, aside from an opening flashback, takes place moments after the first film ends. The surviving members of the Abbott family – Evelyn (Emily Blunt), Regan (Millicent Simmonds), Marcus (Noah Jupe) and newborn baby – need to find a new home. Like the first film, what follows is less a fully-fledged story and more a series of suspenseful sequences set in a post apocalypse beset by monsters that hunt using sound. We end up meeting a new character, Emmett (Cillian Murphy) and the world is expanded somewhat, but it’s basically business as usual.
Performances are uniformly good, with Emily Blunt great as usual and Cillian Murphy giving a gruff American take that feels almost like Joel from The Last of Us. Millicent Simmonds also has more to work with this time, now that she’s written less suicidally stupid, however poor bloody Noah Jupe is now doubly stupid to make up for it.
Ultimately, it’s Krasinski’s taut direction here that is the true star, as time and time again he shuffles the elements and delivers new, clever set pieces. It’s not particularly deep, but it’s utterly engaging, and once again the popcorn butter moistened noise holes of Johnny Audience Member are silenced for a blissful 97 minutes. That fact alone makes A Quiet Place Part II a worthy reason to nip out to the movies.
