Hulu Watching Experience: American Psycho 2

(This review contains a good bit of spoilers...but the title is kind of a spoiler anyway and let's be honest, I doubt you're going to watch this crap.)

I have never tried to make a film before nor have I ever been to Hollywood, but I'd imagine it's hard to get funding for a major feature film. You have to convince people that their idea is so worthwhile that they can throw away millions upon millions of dollars just to see whatever you wrote be put on celluloid. In fact, most of the films people bemoan as crappy Hollywood studio flicks are made to appeal to all demographics, so thus, they're naturally pretty impersonal.

I bring this up because American Psycho 2: All-American Girl was originally known as The Girl Who Wouldn't Die, and had nothing to do with the 2000 satire at all. Mind you, even as a "sequel" in its final form, it still has nothing to do with the original, and seems almost angry that you would ever compare such a film to it. And much like the great schoolwide tradition of Opposite Day, this "sequel" accomplishes the exact opposite of its original.

AP2 opens with a woman, a 12-year-old girl, and a man, introduced as Psycho's Patrick Bateman. After calling him creepy and such, the little girl kills Bateman easily. So basically, the awesome villain of the first film is buried in the first five minutes because a psycho broad just stabs him. This is only the beginning...

This 12-year-old girl grows up to be Mila Kunis, who all of six years later is a girl in college that is whip smart and as hot as Mila Kunis should be. She also says "That's what your mama said" to people. I guess this is what smart people do. Four minutes in, another man named WILLIAM SHATNER shows up. The Shat provides some wonderful merryment and has a creepy romance with one of his students, because obviously, professors sleep with their students, y'see. Kunis then says that she wants to be his teacher's assistant, because somehow, all of Shat's teacher's assistants make it to FBI training. We are introduced to the three hapless teens that aren't Mila Kunis including the weird awkward rich guy, the weird hot blonde, and the weird black guy with dreads. They all die, don't worry. But not before a whiny assistant dies (after making a Ricky Martin and Ricky Ricardo joke about a cat), and before a whacky date between Mila and awkward rich guy, who clearly notes "You have to eat. I have to eat. Let's eat together." I'm using that one next time. This leads to him being so concerned about the T.A. job that encycles the whole movie that he's willing to pay Mila SEVEN FIGURES to drop it. This job is clearly serious. So Mila takes him back to his room, and kills him and such.

These first 30 minutes begin a curious question of what this film's intent truly was. The violence is too implied for an R-rated horror flick. The script is too poorly written to be perceived as intentionally funny, and the acting is too straight-faced to be considered campy. The film is also not a satire in any sort of way, unless its attempts to mock the collegiate system of thinking, and obsessing over insignificant jobs is perceived to be clever. Which while, those elements are involved, they take a backseat to building up Jackie from That 70s Show as a killer mastermind. The music selections are poor, even when such acts as Rilo Kiley and Imogen Heap are among the soundtrack's offerings. They don't really fit the tone in any sort of way...that is, unless we were not supposed to gauge a tone from this movie.

Which, I guess is as good as anything. I'm too lazy to really write up everything that happens, but we essentially build up to Ms. Kunis being ONE IN A BILLION. Her cleverness is so much so that she kills 10 people, and only three of them have a missing persons report out for them, and the cops only come into play over an hour into the feature. Which again, is probably satire, which again, the film fails miserably at doing correctly. By the end of the feature, Kunis is revealed to be so clever that NO ONE BUT ONE PERSON notices that she has changed her identity twice, and that the second identity has taken her to a top FBI position. At least one of the guys is killed in the wide open in a library. Another of the dead bodies is seen by a janitor and a security guard, both later killed, and both never found out about again. By this film's conclusion, I had cackled at the logic mistakes, the poor writing, and the completely horrid attempts at actual humor.

What American Psycho succeeded in making an iconic character who in turn was a great satirizing of yuppie culture and the idea of certain "stereotypes" being safer than others, AP2 all but destroys at the seams. It does not help that Mila Kunis is not Christian Bale, and that American Psycho 2 is not American Psycho.

Rating: REALLY BAD (out of a scale of REALLY BAD, SLIGHTLY BAD, MEDIOCRE, PRETTY GOOD, and AWESOME)

(Writer's Note: Tomorrow might have a selection, and if it does, it'll be ST. ELMO'S FIRE. This will be better than American Psycho 2, I promise, but will it be as fun to write? Find out tomorrow/soon.)