Alexander Millar

Astonishingly bad. A curse on those who said it was worth seeing. Not even worth the dignity of a proper review. Just another cynical sequel cash-grab. A lazy rehash of the same plot-points (incl tacky flashbacks to the original), with none of the power. Keep slutty-sad, big-thighs, bedroom-eyes boyfriend for those sort of roles. He’s not a main character. He’s not a leader. He’s not even angry. Completely baffling to put him in this role, pouring out buckets of gore while being completely sexless. An insulting waste of other actors too, who should have known better. Prince Oberon did what he could, but it was never going to be enough. Denzel was ambiguous in ever sense, until he was finally, tediously, the villain, all while playing the role as a New York gangster in a Rome that was inexplicably blind to race. The whole thing stank of an old fart telling a long-winded story, struggling to keep to the point and constantly getting side-tracked. The ending felt more like a sad death, delivering a happy conclusion on paper but spoiling it with heavy grief and a lingering feeling of cyclic futility to all human endeavours. Thanks for nothing. Merry Christmas

I’m not sure that it added all that much to our understanding of the holocaust or to film itself. Truly great evil is banal, clinical, impersonal, carried out by competent bureaucrats. I didn’t think this was a new/fresh insight. There’s a minor question about what this is doing to the perpetrator’s souls (nothing good), but that’s an offensively trivial concern compared to what they’re doing to others. But certainly it bears thinking about how easily such nightmares can become reality again. I even found this realisation a little uncomfortable in thinking about what evil i’m facilitating in a totally thoughtless way. The industrial suffering of some animals for our food came to mind. However the contrast of examining these banal lives while leaving the great evil that they were facilitating next door unseen, was only interesting up to a point. I found myself growing impatient with the relentless hum drum and felt cheated by the end. All considered, a tedious meditation but worth seeing.