One year ago, pretty much to the day, I had a perplexing dream in which I was viewing Breaking Dawn: Part One at a midnight screening. After the usual boredom associated with watching three teenagers take turns to stare gooey-eyed at one another, coupled with the knowledge of the complete unsuitability of the product with the watcher, things took a demented turn as the onscreen characters began issuing C-sections with their teeth and falling in lusty love with newborns. But this wasn’t a dream was it? This actually happened. Breaking Dawn – Part One actually, genuinely ended with He Of Forehead Fame eating a baby out of Miss Pale Faced Lip Biter, while Will Be Performing In Panto Soon stared longingly at a baby, imagining their future together.
And as I staggered from the cinema at 3am on that November morning, fearing all semblance of my sanity had disappeared, I started to think, “If they keep up that level of lunacy Part Two is gonna be awesome…”
With ‘stuff’ finally happening at the end of BD:P1, in the most wondrously batshit way, Part Two would surely launch from the off with action and plot and a rousing storyline, right? Right? Wrong. Those gooey-eyed, longing looks over plucky guitar strings and warbling songsters that you thought and prayed were finally in the past are back, back, back as Bella (the no longer human one) and Edward (the vampire one) have creepy sex in a creepy house in a creepy wood as their creepy CGI baby, Renesmee (“Bless You!”) creeps everyone out with its creepy face.
Thanks to the ending of the last film – “He ate a baby out of his wife?!?” – even this lackadaisical start is tinged with the hope of something completely off the wall occurring. So when Bella’s Dad comes to visit the newborn it’s not beyond the realms of possibility that the newly turned Bella might eat her father, Movember moustache and all. That SPOILER ALERT she doesn’t, brings us back to earth with the realisation that this might just be a fairly standard series ending.
But Twilight has never been a standard series and as Jacob (the werewolf one) has to explain to the girl he used to love that he’s now in love with her one-week-old daughter, Renesmee (“Gesundheit!”), you start to think that director Bill Condon deserves an Oscar for being astute enough to embrace and balance the giggles. The much maligned Taylor Lautner deserves some kudos too for a duo of scenes that are (hopefully intentionally) hysterically funny, thus making the “everything is hunky dory, boring and snory” opening the tiniest bit more tolerable.
Thankfully for everyone it’s not long before Michael Sheen, the absolute best thing in the series, shows up threatening to throw babies into fires and it all becomes quite entertaining again. Complete bollocks, of course, but entertaining bollocks nonetheless. As it races towards the end the film lacks the delivery of a huge climax to rival those other franchise closers, for example there’s no ‘Siege of Hogwarts’ from that other literary phenomenon that finally became interesting at the closing hurdle, but what it lacks in grandiosity it makes up for in severed heads. And everyone likes a good multiple severed heads finale.
Recommended
As ever, from New Moon on, Breaking Dawn – Part Two isn’t going to win any converts and virtually every word here, positive or negative isn’t going to influence anyone’s opinion one iota. For Twiglets (the proper name for Twilight fans as Twi-hards just feels mean) it’s enough that they get to scream “Ermahgerd” at R-Patz and K-Stew one last time. For haterz who simply havez to hatez it’ll be like fangs on a chalkboard.
The hard to digest truth is The Twilight Saga as a whole was hard to hate. Virtually impossible not to laugh at, but hard to hate.
Verdict
Subjectively The Twilight Saga is the definition of a three star series (five if you’re a fan, one star if you lack even the slightest sense of humour) and Breaking Dawn – Part Two is the definition of a three star film. It has moments that will entertain even the most ardent hold-outs – mainly Michael Sheen related – but it ends as it started, a franchise for fans and no-one else.