a review of 心慌方2：超立方体

Hooptober, bonus movie #2: Although at first this looks like a solid upgrade from Cube '98 in terms of presenting a more mindbending premise (the modular cube prison is now interpolated into a four-dimensional hypercube where the laws of physics get mighty wobbly) this movie is unfortunately saddled with a badly-cast ensemble who reminded me more of the Wednesday night crowd at Applebee's than the scrappier bunch from the first film. It doesn't help that the actors are in turn given a script that actively fails to care whether any one of them lives, dies, or gets split into a dozen quantum realities. Instead of the fairly solid sense of stakes and progression that we got in the first film, here things just kind of happen seemingly at random until we get to the last 10 minutes and we're handed a forced conclusion that just brings up more questions than the film is prepared to answer for us. (It must also be said that as resoundingly Canadian as the first film was, this one effectively turns the Canadian-ness up to 11. When we get to the scene where the characters are telling each other where they all originally came from pre-Cube, and somehow it's all US cities and states with strong regional accents that sound nothing like the overwhelmingly Canadian-sounding actors making up this cast, I had to say out loud "MOVIE, WHO ARE YOU TRYING TO FOOL HERE?")