YMMV / Don't Breathe 2

• Broken Base: The film transparently is what it is because the Blind Man from the first movie was everyone's favorite part, and many found him A Lighter Shade of Black than the unpleasant criminals raiding his house. But was going the whole nine yards and making him from an unconventional slasher villain into a deeply-dark Anti-Hero given an understandable motive and a redemption arc a good move, or is it just too hard to look past some of his more despicable misdeeds in the first film? Is the clumsy writing surrounding the villains just correcting against the already clumsy attempt to make him more villainous than the protagonists from the first film?
• Critical Dissonance: The film has a Rotten critical score of 41% compared to a Fresh audience score of 85%. Ironically, the original film had a higher critical score than its audience score. Audience members who didn't like the original film probably skipped this one.
• Esoteric Happy Ending: We're supposed to be happy that Phoenix is in the comforting arms of... an orphanage in the slums of Detroit. An extremely depressing movie could start with the exact same premise.
• Narm:
  • It can be a little hard to take the Blind Man's apparent death scene very seriously when the characters start quoting Return of the Jedi nearly word-for-word (Phoenix says she needs to save him, only for the Blind Man to reply "You already have"). A similar moment occurs when Raylan yells "Everybody!" in an apparent homage to The Professional.
  • The reveal of the true reasons for the father to rescue Phoenix it's so comically evil that it becomes hard to take seriously. For some reason, the writers decided that this time the murderous rapist who kidnapped Phoenix is the one we should be rooting for.
• Signature Scene: Most reviews have lauded the initial break-in sequence, a long tracking shot where the camera follows Phoenix as she carefully evades the invaders for several minutes.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: Thanks to the Evil Versus Evil premise, the audience either has to root for ex-military thugs, who want to harvest Phoenix's heart to save their meth cook, or for the Blind Man, who kidnapped Phoenix in the first place and raped a woman in the past. Other than Phoenix, Hernandez is the only truly heroic character, and she is the film's first death.

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