I enjoyed this film more than I expected to. That’s
mostly because my expectations were very, very low. A derivative of a derivative
of a derivative, this is about the breaking point of how far James Wan projects
can be stretched. When they completely abandon ‘things-based-on-things-the-Warrens-claimed’
angle for Conjuring spin-offs with The Nun, I think that might be a step
too far. This one is just about grounded in their exploits still, though it
goes wholly into invented-plot territory by showing where the creepy Annabelle
doll was made. The real one, of course, was made in a factory with all the
other Raggedy Anns, but movie Annabelle is an ugly, creepy pseudo-Victorian
doll. Here, we find she was made by American dollmaker Samuel Mullins in the
40s. Because I guess someone still had to make creepy dolls that they didn’t
even sell back during WWII.
I was so uninterested in the particulars of this movie
that I didn’t even realise it was the second Annabelle movie. I thought it was the only one, but there was an Annabelle before Annabelle: Creation, itself a prequel to the Conjuring films where the story of the cursed doll was told in
brief. I guess that film only covered the events that led the Warrens to investigating
the doll, whereas this one covers how the doll was made.
Honestly, the doll barely figures into the story. It
has nothing to do with the tragedy that kickstarts the action, acts as a vessel
in an episode told only in flashback, and then is only briefly the place a
nefarious being resides (that can in any case project itself out around the
house in just about any form) before spending most of the film being just a bit
of background decoration. The film wants to show a darker evil than an ugly
doll, but in doing so makes the doll seem superfluous.
But there were some things I liked here. While it
shared with the other Conjuring films
a propensity to show too much of the monsters/spirits that come with the
tedious jump scares, there were some scenes where tension was built quickly. The
level of gore was ramped up a bit from the safe boundaries of the other films.
Plus while we’ve had a whole lot of creepy kid and creepy doll movies in the
past few years, other than IT –
adapting an older property anyway – there have been strangely few films with
kids on their own being terrified. Slicing them up is probably way off-limits
for a film like this, but having the nasty hauntings happening to little orphan
kids without parents to run to felt a little different from other properties.
There are some fairly decent performances, too. The
Mexican nun caring for the kids and the father are very believable, but the two
main kids are definitely the most interesting. I wonder if the two kids will go
on to have interesting careers. The rest of the kids did their best with the
roles they had, but they were paper-thin - little more than bully girl, token
black girl with no discernable personality, smallest girl, etc.
The film trundles along with jump scares and some
creepy setpieces, never really shows any interest in defining rules as to what
this evil spirit can and can’t do, gets a bit lost with which girl the audience
follows as the core of the narrative, and then comes to a satisfyingly
bombastic climax.
Nothing new, nothing clever and nothing exceptional, it
was nonetheless a solid, safe Hollywood film. I expected it to be dreadful, so
being merely mediocre leaves me feeling quite positive about it.
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