Unfriended: Dark Web

As my wife and I get older, our tolerance for certain film tropes is waning.  She has a problem with sex scenes and with realistic gore.  As far as the gore is concerned, I don't think she's really changed, it's just that special effects got so much better, and it grosses her out.  Regarding sex scenes, her morals haven't changed - she still believes in the right of consenting adults to do whatever makes them happy - she just doesn't want to watch it.

As for me, I'm developing more empathy, and it makes it hard to enjoy horror movies the way I once did.  I don't mind if a few characters get killed, but I feel a lot better about it if they've done something to deserve it.  Watching innocent people get killed is starting to feel less and less like entertainment, and more and more like torture porn.

When I watched the first Unfriended in 2016, I was impressed.  It was an original concept, as fresh as Blair Witch felt when the "found footage" genre was new.  I liked how Unfriended was presented as if your TV screen was the protagonist's laptop.  I liked how you could tell what she was thinking by which tabs she opened, and what searches she made.  I liked how sometimes she would start to type something, then erase it, then type something else - giving us more insight into her thought process than you usually get in a movie.

But something else I liked, though it didn't really dawn on me at the time.  (Spoiler alert)  Everyone who got killed was guilty.  All of the characters were complicit in the events that led to the ghost's suicide, at least to some degree.  In a way, the ghost was the protagonist, and the movie was a revenge story, a la Death Wish.

Now, I'm not necessarily saying that all the characters in Unfriended deserved the death penalty for their part in the girl's suicide.  But their deaths do sting less knowing that they're bad people, and the world isn't any worse off for their absence.

Which brings us to the sequel, Unfriended: Dark Web.  Warning, spoilers follow.  

First off, U:DW is only a sequel in the sense that it uses the same format.  Once again, the TV screen is the main character's laptop.  Once again, the characters are killed off one by one.  Once again... no wait, that's it.  That's pretty much where the similarities end.

For one thing, it's not a vengeful spirit this time.  It debatable whether there's anything supernatural in U:DW at all, but more on that in a minute.  For another thing, this movie's victims didn't do anything wrong.  Well, okay, the main character stole the laptop from a coffee shop's lost and found, which is what gets the plot going.  But the other characters are innocent and, for the most part, likable.

I don't like that.  The twist at the end (major spoiler) is that the laptop was lost on purpose, by Dark Web hackers, as part of a game.  Apparently they wait until someone takes the laptop, then hunt them down and kill them, along with any potential witnesses.  This is all done for entertainment, with sadistic viewers all over the Dark Web watching this online cat-and-mouse game for fun.

Okay, but what about all this am I supposed to find fun?  If the Dark Webbers are presented as evil for watching this kind of thing, what does that say about me if I find the movie enjoyable?  Granted, to me it's fiction, while to the story's fictional viewers, real people are getting killed.  I get that.  But still, it almost feels like the movie's meta statement is, only evil people enjoy watching this kind of setup.

Another complaint I have has to do with continuity.  It feels like the writers couldn't decide whether the killer was going to be supernatural or not.  For 99% of the movie, I'm confident that the bad guys are just super hackers.  But there's this special effect that happens whenever they're on camera.  Their presence causes the cameras to glitch.  

Okay, so maybe they're carrying some sort of device that plays with camera frequencies.  But there's one scene that challenges that theory.  It's filmed from the ground, when a bad guy pushes someone off a roof.  Even from that distance, the killer glitches and warps in a way that really shouldn't happen if nothing supernatural is involved.

But who knows.  Regardless of whether the killers are using high technology or a pact with demons, this movie just didn't do it for me the way the first one did.  The interface is still cool, but I've already seen it.  There's nothing really innovative here, nothing that improves on the original, and nothing that would make me want to see it a second time.

Bottom line:  It's not terrible, but I'd rather just rewatch the first one.