Well, that was a bit of a comedown. After riding high on the first film, I barrelled straight into ‘China O’Brien 2’ expecting…Hoping. That it would continue the momentum of the first film…It did not.

The plot picks up a few months to a year after the events of the first film and the focus this time is on a recently released from prison Drug lord, whos planning a major sale, while at the same time we’re reintroduced to China and the crew who are being awarded by the towns mayor for their turnaround of the local police department since China became Sheriff, we’re shown that China has kind of settled into a life of fairly mundane local crimes, but when she accidentally busts a key mechanism of this Drug lords plans for a major Drug deal, a bounty is placed on Chinas head her her friend Dekota and his friends are taken hostage. Leading China and Matt to try everything in their powers to bust Baskins drug dealing operations and rescue Dekota and crew unharmed.

The quality fall is palpable here, its clear they had even less money than the first film, and the cuts have run too deep to really salvage this piece. What we essentially have here are a handful of small budget set pieces that ARE fun…that get diluted away to pretty much nothing by the rolling gulfs of nothingness that happen when the fun things arnt happening.

The scripts pacing has taken a hit right to the kneecaps it seems. The opening third of the movie barely even feature China and the crew and instead focusses on Baskin and his team settling old scores and setting up the framework that’ll dictate the rest of the movies direction. By the time the main crew DO show up in any meaningful sense, its already kind of too late. As we then have to follow them as they uncover what we’ve already been told up front AND THEN we have to sit with them while they figure out a plan.

The pacing is positively glacial, the act structuring seemingly stalls part way into the opening act and doesnt really recover until the final 10-15 minutes. The characters feel like they’ve undergone a degree of ‘flanderization’ with all the nuance and bumps that made the characters fun and cheesy in the first film being heavily sanded down because they need to push the plot forwards by any means necessary.

The dialogue isnt as playful, it feels much more scripted and less naturalistic, which really hobbles the film as that was the most endering quality of the first film. Essentially; there are maybe 3-5 scenes in this film that collectively run to maybe just shy of a quarter of the runtime, where they try something a bit silly, or weird, or they try to experiment a bit…and then the rest of the film is just overtly bland sequence building and plotting that doesnt try to rock the boat and doesnt really do anything other than trying to copy the stuff that worked in the first film…just with less money, less passion and lower energy.

The same impacts the direction too, the fight scenes are all massively scaled back in terms of choreography, they dont mask the connections as well as the first film, the scope to experiment seems to have been scaled back massively due to the budget cuts, which means we have many MANY more sequences of people just kind of sitting around talking idley to each other. Everything feels a lot flatter, a lot less colourful or interesting and a lot LOT safer, to the point of the films detriment.

Cast direction is about the same as the first film, which is a small mercy, it may not have a lot of money to do much. But they at least let the characters use props and improvise within the frame physically a little bit. Which did just about bring an element of a sparkle back to the production. But its still not really as good as the first film.

The cines been paired back, we have less creative lighting choices, less b-roll, less experimentation with shot compositions, less of a ‘vision’ for the film. It feels like a film that was shot on the cheap to try and cash in on the heat the first film gave off. Its not inherently badly shot…it just feels a bit bland, boring and played out. At a point where they really could and should have ramped up…they basically fizzled out to nothing.

Even the performances are significantly flatter, with Harlowe Marks as our villian Baskins just…being kind of drab. he doesnt have the right energy for this, he just comes across as a generic baddie from any low budget action film from the mid 80s onwards. Totally unremarkable. Cynthia Rothrock feels increasingly throughout this film like she wasnt taking this very seriously. Previously I thought she wasnt the best performer in terms of dialogue delivery or physical acting. But I commended her martial arts abilities and when the film did get ‘serious’ she more than rose to the occasion to match the energy required. In this film? she gets significantly less screen time, her acting is still flat, but not they’re scaling back the martial arts work too, meaning she gets even less interesting stuff to do, and the stuff that she DOES do well, they’re scaling back on.

Even the supporting cast feel lower quality/less engaged on the production. with Keith Cook getting a decent share of the screen time, but very little to say, and even less to do physically. and Richard Norton essentially being paired down to a sidekick role where he gets almost nothing to do until the finale.

adding to this the soundtrack, which feels recycled and doenst quite fit right to the tone of this film…and overall? this is a bit of a wash…its not inherently bad, its just kind of boring. Nowhere near as good as the first one. It desperately needed more money and….just…actual heart and soul putting into it. This film feels like it was being churned out for the sake of being made…I feel like if someone actually WANTED this thing to exist,it could have played out differently. Definitely one to give a wide birth, it reminded me a bit of the quality difference between ‘Day’ and ‘Strike’ of the panther….and much like that film series. I’ll probably just stick to watching ‘China O’Brien’ going forward.

source https://letterboxd.com/tytdreviews/film/china-obrien-ii/