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Park your brain at the door.
The cleavage-and-carnage horror thriller P2, about a woman trapped by a psycho in a dingy parking garage on Christmas Eve, has jolts, splatter, shocks and, like its characters, not much smarts. No matter. People are still stabbed, bludgeoned, bloodied, blinded, bitten and smucked against concrete walls like insects on windshields. At last, it's the holiday treat we've all been waiting for.
The gorgeous Rachel Nichols plays Angela Bridges, a corporate go-getter who's the last one out of her Park Avenue office building on Christmas Eve. Yet she's not the only one having a pathetic holiday season. The parkade's creepy attendant Thomas (American Beauty's Wes Bentley) is dining alone on turkey too and when Angela's car breaks down, he's more than happy to help her out. Or at least help himself to her.
Thus, she's drugged and dragged to Thomas' grungy office where she wakes up wearing only a confused look and a low-cut silk white dress. Around this time you start to envy the turkey.
The cat-and-mouse game that follows delivers little we haven't seen before. Angela has a cellphone, but can't get a signal. When the police arrive, poking around, can Thomas escape being exposed? Yet if it all recalls the formulaic frights found in Dead Calm and Panic Room, P2 at least doesn't suffer from artistic ambitions. It knows what it is and never purports to be anything but efficient and engrossing. The filmmakers are also aided immeasurably by two remarkable central performances. Even while flittering around in a flimsy dress, Nichols is never less than grounded and believable, countered perfectly by Bentley's off-kilter energy. His Thomas, like Norman Bates, manages to arouse sympathy even when he's at his cruelest. Still, did he need an Elvis fixation?
P2 was produced and co-written by Alexandre Aja, the director of the French thriller Haute Tension and the Hills Have Eyes remake. His presence probably explains the film's potentially off-putting bursts of violence.
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Then again -- and maybe I'm just desensitized -- compared to Saw IV, P2 felt about as bloody as On Golden Pond.
(This film is rated 14-A)