REVIEW: "Fall 2: Deadpoint"
Courtesy of Lionsgate
Sometimes all a good thriller needs is a ridiculous premise. The original Fall featured two friends climbing a 2,000-foot TV tower and getting stuck, and it turned out to be a surprisingly fun and tense watch. That movie felt like a perfectly self-contained story, but its modest box office success and surprising popularity on various streaming platforms made a sequel inevitable. So now we have Fall 2, which raises the absurd stakes by sending its characters even higher, this time on a 4,000-foot mountain plank walk in Thailand. It fully buys into the old sequel rule that bigger is better, but it loses some of the first movie’s simple charm in the process.
This time around, the story follows Jax Hunter (Harriet Slater), the grieving sister of Virginia Gardner’s character from the first movie. Jax meets her late sister’s adventurous friend, Luce (Arsema Thomas), who invites her to take part in a wild plan: an illegal plank walk 4,000 feet up Mount Kwan in Thailand. The goal is to reach a legendary stone sculpture known locally as “The Death Dragon.” You’d think that name alone would give any sane person pause, but logic takes a quick back seat here with these characters.
The biggest hurdle with this movie right out of the gate is becoming invested in the girls’ journey. Jax is introduced as overly cautious, yet it takes her about sixty seconds to agree to a death-defying trek with a stranger she just barely met. Then, before you can blink, the characters are in Thailand, hiring a blatantly sketchy guide named John (Tom Brittney) to lead them up the mountain. The whole setup moves so fast that it is hard to buy into their instant friendship or Jax’s choices. You can tell the script simply needed these characters up on that mountain, sacrificing reason for expediency.
If this mountain trek has a real highlight, it’s Andrew Stahorn’s stunning cinematography. As the characters move across loose, groaning wooden planks tenuously anchored to the stone face, the camera captures amazingly dizzying, stomach-dropping views. For the most part, successfully blending real action with great visual effects. It makes the drops look endless, the footholds seem impossibly tiny, and for a few fleeting moments, you get that awesome, sweaty-palmed thrill you came for. It provides glimpses of a much stronger thriller, one confident enough to let its terrifying setting do the heavy lifting.
Unfortunately, even the most suspenseful moments get tripped up by how stupid things get. It’s hard to keep audiences on the edge of their seats when the plot keeps giving them reasons to roll their eyes. Instead of gripping armrests and worrying about their survival, you’ll end up chuckling at how ridiculous the duo’s latest setback is.
And speaking of the duo navigating those crazy heights, they don’t have quite the same impact as the first pair did. Grace Caroline Currey and Gardner brought a real, believable energy to the first movie that made you root for them through every harrowing moment. Slater and Thomas do their best, but their dialogue feels a bit stiff, and their emotional connection never fully clicks. You definitely believe they’re terrified, but you don’t feel their close bond beneath all of their screaming and scrambling.
To its credit, Deadpoint doesn’t just rehash every single beat from the first movie. Shifting the action from a rusty metal tower to a sweeping mountain cliff gives the sequel’s danger a fresher angle. Still, the film’s frequent cutting to new flashbacks featuring Curry and Gardner needlessly reinforces a connection we already get, and only further undermines any connection to the new duo. Plus, the sequel throws in a couple of big plot twists that are clearly included to try and outdo the first’s surprise reveal. And each new twist asks us to stretch our disbelief a little further, without building any real suspense or tension in return.
Directors Michael and Peter Spierig have some awesome genre pictures, like Undead, Daybreakers, and Predestination. But here, though, they struggle to keep the momentum going when the movie isn’t focused on the high-stunt action sequences. The charm of the first Fall was in its lean, straightforward, no-frills setup. Unfortunately, the sequel is overloaded with extra stuff, and the fun buckles under the weight.
Incredibly, the ending leaves the door open for a third Fall, clearly aiming to turn this once-simple survival story into a full-fledged franchise. That’s a bold move for a sequel that already struggles to justify its own existence. Forget that 4,000-foot drop; the biggest leap here is that Fall 2: Deadpoint asks audiences to believe this story needs to keep going.
Fall 2: Deadpoint is currently available to rent on VOD.