TITLE: P2
STUDIO: Summit Entertainment
RELEASE DATE: April 8th, 2008
STARRING: Rachel Nichols and Wes Bentley
WRITTEN BY: Alexandre Aja, Gregory Levasseur, & Franck Khalfoun
DIRECTED BY: Franck Khalfoun
FEATURES:
Audio Commentary with Director and Filmmakers
A New Level of Fear: The Making of P2
Designing Terror
Tension Nouveau: Presenting Franck Khalfoun

P2 is one of those horror movies that starts well and has its gory heart in the right place but just can't maintain interest in its paper-thin premise for the running time of a feature-length film. It might have made a very good episode of the now-defunct Masters of Horror or maybe The Outer Limits but maybe the lack of anthology series on the air led the team behind The Hills Have Eyes and High Tension to think they could stretch their idea into a movie. They couldn't. Repetitive and increasingly ridiculous, P2 features two young actors giving it their all but a screenplay that give absolutely nothing but a concept back to them.

The first act of P2, clearly the one most thought-out if just for pitch meetings, is easily the strongest. The movie\ doesn't actually lose its way until around the halfway point. Before then, we're introduced to Angela (Rachel Nichols), an ambitious corporate climber who works so hard that she ends up being the last one in her office building just before its about to close for the Christmas holiday break. A warning to workers to never be the last one in a parking garage and, basically, just to take public transportation work if you live in a major city, Angela journeys down into the sub-basement of her building to find that her car won't start. She locates the nighttime security guard Thomas (Wes Bentley), who seems like a nice guy at first. Don't they all? Of course, before you can say "Isn't that the creepy kid from American Beauty?", Thomas is drugging poor Angela, changing her clothes, and chaining her to a chair so they can have Christmas dinner together. From there, it's a battle of how Angela will escape and what kind of variables new director Franck Khalfoun can add to a plot that doesn't seem to have an easy to keep the tension high.

Of course, knowing that modern audiences wouldn't be satisfied with just a battle of wills between two characters, the writers behind P2 keep adding more and more ridiculous twists (like Thomas also having kidnapped someone else close to Angela and killing the building's security guard with no one noticing or coming to check on him) that P2 simply collapses under the weight of its hard-to-take suspension of disbelief. The tension actually drains out of the piece as it becomes more and more over-the-top. What too many filmmakers forget is that it's just as often the little things - like a creepy conversation with your kidnapper and his 'Christmas dinner' - that make the hair on your neck stand up like the gory ones.

The DVD for P2 almost saves the film with its technical presentation and interesting collection of special features. Summit Entertainment is new to the game but they give P2 a video and audio transfer to admire and the extras are above average for a horror film not from a proven franchise. Fans of P2 will find a commentary track with the director and filmmakers and a trio of pretty short featurettes that don't really offer too much insight, but only because its a relatively simple movie. The passion of the filmmakers, especially the great Alexandre Aja (High Tension) could almost convince a viewer that P2 works as a complete film instead of the half-experience it ended up.