Hitcher 2, The (2003)

Reviewed on Mar 03, 2007 under Horror |

Directed by Louis Morneau
Written by Molly Meeker, Charles Meeker, and Leslie Scharf
Starring
- C. Thomas Howell
- Kari Wuhrer
- Jake Busey
- Shaun Johnston
- Marty Antonini

It’s undeniable from the outset that this movie was unnecessary. A sequel to a thriller released seventeen years previous, which had had a respectable life on video but no tremendous following? There was no narrative reason for the sequel, either; no unanswered questions or loose ends which demanded to be dealt with. So when one keeps in mind that making this movie was one of the dumbest instances of sequelitis ever to hit Hollywood, the finished product really isn’t so bad. It may be the sterling example of crafting something approaching a silk purse from the situational pig’s ear. But it’s also hard to shake the awareness that, behind the energy and suspense, the movie knows it really has no business existing.

You are heartily encouraged, if you have not seen the original, to bring yourself up to speed here. All good? Let’s proceed. And a warning that there must needs be spoilers in this review.

A scene from the upcoming I Know What You Did That Summer in Texas.

The opening scenes of the sequel toy with us by suggesting that maybe, just maybe, John Ryder had made the monster he wanted to. On a dark and stormy night in Iowa, a single-prop plane sets down in the middle of a rural two-lane road, blocking a car carrying a Grandpa-ish type and young Billy. The pilot, none other than Jim Halsey himself (C. Thomas Howell), protests engine trouble, and solicits the older gentleman to hold a light for him. But once he’s got Grandpa’s hands busy with the flashlight, Jim pulls out a gun and shoots the man several times. As Jim then approaches the car, a half-dozen police cars pull up, and when Jim slides into the car with a knife out, we find… that Jim is a cop, rescuing the child from an abductor.

Which is all well and good, and it’s fairly believable that Jim might seek out a job in law enforcement after the traumatic experiences in the first movie, if only to feel a sense of power and self-protection. Unfortunately, the dead grandpa had not drawn any sort of weapon, and shooting unarmed suspects is generally frowned upon. And this apparently isn’t the first time that Jim has gone further than the mandate of a peace officer. Unwilling to enter counselling, Jim is instead fired from the force.

Needing to exorcise some demons, Jim calls Captain Esteridge (Stephen Hair filling in for Jeffrey DeMunn), the cop who long ago believed him and was his inspiration for pinning on a badge. Esteridge invites him to come back down to West Texas to face down his past and put it to rest. So, gritting his teeth, Jim flies down with his committed girlfriend Maggie (Kari Wuhrer), in whom he hasn’t confided about his grisly past. Maggie is also a pilot; in fact, she runs a cropdusting company, and so if you haven’t already guessed that aerial skills will come in handy in the third act, I’m more than a little disappinted in you.

Sorry, fanboy, this is as close as you’re getting to a shower scene.

So fifteen-odd years later, Jim finds himself driving the same stretch of road to reach Esteridge’s place, in the middle of a dust storm… when they see a hitchhiker, a biker whose motorcycle went off the road. Jim’s all for leaving the fellow to eat dust, but since Maggie doesn’t know that picking up a hitchhiker is the absolute LAST thing Jim wants to do in West Texas, she insists they pull over. Just to make things worse, the biker is dressed almost identically to John Ryder, Rutger Hauer’s character in the original: charcoal grey clothes under a black duster. He gets in the back, pulls of his helmet, and reveals…

Jake Busey.

Now understand, Jake Busey does psycho just about as well as anybody. He’s inherited a goodly quotient of his father’s “deranged enough to snort cocaine off a dog” demeanor, and he’s got those long teeth that were meant to bite the heads off chickens. But he’s filling a role (or the analog thereof) first played by Rutger Hauer in the mid-80s, when Hauer was the toughest, scariest Aryan hardcase alive. Hauer could have swallowed Busey whole and not realized that he wasn’t a breakfast Danish. (No, that’s not a jab at Hauer’s waistline. Tough guys are allowed to get old too, okay?) All I’m saying is that if you’re looking to find someone to fill the shoes of Rutger Hauer at his coolest and badassiest, Jake Busey isn’t the name that immediately pops into your head.

So it’s a good thing that the part of “Jack” (he initially introduces himself as “Jim” too, but this is the name that he’s later given) isn’t written as Hauer’s John Ryder all over again, nor does Busey try to play it that way. Jack is a little down-homey, a little garrulous, disturbing in his smug extroversion instead of in the confident impassiveness that Hauer displayed.

There’s never a chicken around when you need one.

None of which sets Jim’s mind at ease. So when he sees Jack reaching for his inside pocket, Jim pulls a gun and orders him out of the vehicle (almost wrecking with a semi in the process). Maggie, of course, thinks he’s entirely off his rocker, and the audience shares in some of that suspicion. We, obviously, know the premise of the movie… but is Jack really another traveling killer in the mold of John Ryder, or is he made more of a demon in Jim’s desperate mind?

Well, she and we find the answer not too long after, when Jim is pulled over my a sheriff’s deputy for speeding. The truck that picked up Jack way back returns down the road and parks, and the driver gets out: Unfortunately, it’s Jack, who’s disguised himself in the dead driver’s hat and glasses and scalp, and soon there’s a dead deputy on the side of the road, and Jim’s feverishly explaining to Maggie why he really ought to be trusted when he says he does NOT want to pick up hitchhikers in West Texas.

Which, of course, leads to the single biggest impediment to the suspension of disbelief in the entire movie: That on the only two occasions on which Jim drives through isolated Pecos County, separated by a decade and a half, he meets each time a hitchhiking psychopath. And it’s not as if West Texas is replete with psycho killers; if so, the police would be quick to take the victims’ word for it each time. (”Charlie, we got us another mass murderer thumbing a ride on the east-west, you wanna take it? I need a donut break.”) Later in the movie, we get acquainted with just about every police officer in the county, and they certainly don’t treat a string of gruesome hitchhiking murders as business as usual. No matter how you slice it or try to justify it, then, the whole premise of this sequel comes down to an unswallowable coincidence.

Told ya.

I don’t want to walk you through the particulars of the cat-and-mouse that ensues, but I do want to note that the Powers That Be wisely realized that John Rider was only able to believably torment Jim to the degree he did because of Rutger Hauer’s commanding persona, seeming almost to be some kind of elemental or amoral demi-god who could predict Jim’s every move and somehow get there ahead of time. Busey’s Jack isn’t such a larger-than-life character; only once does he arrive ahead of Jim and Maggie, and that time it’s established that he would know where they were going (though how he beat them there is problematic). The rest of the time he simply knows what he’s doing, whereas Jim and Maggie are frazzled and strung-out. Also unlike Rider, Jack uses his country-boy act to good effect, deflecting police suspicion from himself by setting up his quarry to look like the aggressors and himself like the victim. To that end, he even chops off his own pinkie to make it appear that Maggie is a violent and cruel criminal on the run. (It’s a little homage to the french-fried finger scene in the original, right down to Jack tossing the severed digit into a fat fryer, and it would probably work better if Busey’s real finger weren’t clearly visible beneath it’s “stunt double.”)

Now, the recent remake of The Hitcher garnered plenty of criticism for one divergent element in particular, which I predicted from the earliest reports of its release: That instead of a single driver being pursued by the relentless hitchhiker, the remake posited a boyfriend/girlfriend driving team. That setup negates the awful isolation of driving alone through the empty West Texas hills, with the murderous hitchhiker being the only recurring and damnably familiar face. You might think on the surface that this sequel also suffers from the same problem, owing to the addition of the character of Maggie. Again, the Powers That Be apparently saw the weakness here, and [If you didn't listen to the spoiler warning earlier, I have no sympathy for you] used the “Psycho Option”: At forty minutes in, Jim expires from seveal bullet wounds, leaving Maggie alone and injured to face down or outrun Jack. I’ve gone on record previously to say that I think that that was a mistake and a flaw when Hitchcock did it in Psycho (1960), and it’s no less problematic here: Jim had not only been our sole link to the previous movie, but he was very clearly set up as the protagonist. We saw everything through his eyes, right down to flashbacks and waking dreams. Switching horses halfway through a movie is “surprising” and “unpredictable,” all right, because suddenly we are very literally watching a different story from that point on.

The, um, “cutting edge” special effects.

On the other hand, you might find yourself distracted from that by the sheer energy of the movie. Director Louis Morneau (beloved of bad movie fans everywhere for gracing us with Bats (1999)) manages a tight pace while still giving plenty of stark, lonely footage of West Texas. And boy, does he like to keep that camera movie. A lot. Always. I’d hate to be the next director who had to rely on the dolly and crane used here right after they were returned to the rental place.

So for an unnecessary sequel, it’s a fair bit of suspense cinema. But it tries to walk the impossible line between relying on its predecessor and standing on its own as an original film, and manages to do each only by fits and starts, at the wrong times. At least it isn’t one of those sequels which retroactive ruins the original for the viewer.