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P2
Summit Entertainment

P2 reviews
Critic Score
Metascore: 37 Metascore out of 100
User Score  
5.3 out of 10
based on 15 reviews
Read critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
based on 18 votes
Read user comments
Rate this movie

MPAA RATING: R for strong violence/gore, terror and language

Starring Rachel Nichols, Wes Bentley, Simon Reynolds, Grace Lynn Kung, and Paul Sun-Hyung Lee

It's Christmas Eve: a time for curling up by the fire with family and friends; a day when even the most voracious corporate climbers generally head home by dinnertime. But not Angela. She's the last one left at the office, determined to close one more deal before the holiday. The long hours she keeps will have an impact, but not the kind she's been hoping for. When she gets down to the parking garage, she discovers her car won't start. The timing couldn't be worse; she's already late for Christmas Eve dinner with her family, the garage is deserted, and her cell phone doesn't get a signal underground. But then a friendly security guard comes along and offers to help. He flirtatiously invites her to stay and share a small Christmas dinner he's preparing in the parking office, but she laughs it off. Before she knows what's hit her, she's been knocked unconscious. When she wakes up, she's tied to a chair in the security guard's office. As it turns out, his dinner invitation was not optional--and it's going to involve a lot more than a meal. If Angela wants to live to see Christmas morning, she must find a way to escape from level P2 of the parking garage. (Summit Entertainment)


GENRE(S): Horror  |  Suspense/Thriller  
WRITTEN BY: Alexandre Aja
Franck Khalfoun
Gregory Levasseur
 
DIRECTED BY: Franck Khalfoun  
RELEASE DATE: DVD: April 8, 2008 
Theatrical: November 9, 2007 
RUNNING TIME: 98 minutes, Color 
ORIGIN: USA 

What The Critics Said

All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...

70
Village Voice Chuck Wilson
If it weren't for two excessively violent deaths, P2 could be termed a refreshingly old-fashioned thriller, one dependent on hairbreadth escapes and the pluck of its heroine.
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70
Washington Post Mike Mayo
If in the end P2 contains few surprises, it's still a nice piece of polished escapism.
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63
ReelViews James Berardinelli
P2 doesn't crash and burn, but its finale is more generic than what the effective first hour leads us to hope for.
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60
The New York Times Jeannette Catsoulis
Swift and stealthy P2 is a canny exploitation of one of the urban woman’s greatest fears: the after-hours parking garage. Throw in a car that won’t start, a creepy security guard and a filmmaking team with perfect synchronicity, and the result is a minimalist nightmare.
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58
Seattle Post-Intelligencer Sean Axmaker
The minor pleasures of P2 lie in the simple effectiveness of the sleekly unshowy direction and the clean, unadorned script, which pares away extraneous distractions like motivation and complicated back stories to get on with the mechanics of tension and the obligatory jumps and startles (which stand in for genuine scares).
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50
TV Guide Maitland McDonagh
No two ways about it: The screenplay is derivative. But the location adds a little novelty to the standard-issue running and screaming.
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50
San Francisco Chronicle Walter Addiego
Standard-issue slasher pic.
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50
The Hollywood Reporter Kirk Honeycutt
In the sadism-for-thrills sweepstakes, P2 is no "Saw," but it will get young women to clutch their dates for a week or so in theaters before fading to DVD shelves.
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40
Variety John Anderson
What "Psycho" did for the shower, P2 tries very hard to do for the parking garage, spending most of its time below ground, and below an adequate level of convincing dread.
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40
Austin Chronicle Marc Savlov
Ultimately, though, and despite an enormously creepy turn from Bentley (American Beauty), the story has nowhere else to go but into the standard (albeit judiciously-used) stalk-and-slash territory.
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25
Chicago Tribune Jessica Reaves
The lighting is appropriately dim, the music is reasonably clever, and they get in a few nice scares in the beginning. But as the movie wears on and Angela’s desperation grows, any glimmer of fun seeps away. And we’re left watching the same old grim game of cat and mouse.
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25
New York Post Kyle Smith
This is one of those thrillers where the person on-screen is often the only person in the theater who can't guess what'll happen next. Lots of laughable moments provide camp value, though, and Bentley ("American Beauty") makes for a charismatic creep.
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25
The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Jason McBride
A pointless thriller.
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16
Baltimore Sun Robert Abele
Has the feeling of something done many times before.
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0
Boston Globe Wesley Morris
Amid the dumbness and disgust for paying customers, the movie does manage to cough up something I didn't expect: a performance so terrible you can't quite believe it's happening: Bentley's.
Read Full Review

What Our Users Said

Vote Now!The average user rating for this movie is 5.3 (out of 10) based on 18 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

Cameron G. gave it a2:
Not terrible in the vein of The Hills Have Eyes 2, but utterly formulaic and totally unfrightening.

Brandon E. gave it a7:
P2 actually wasn't as bad as people are giving it credit. It was very suspenseful and caused me to jump a few times. Although some parts were predictable, not all of it was. It could have been better with a more realistic dog attack and a better ending.

Jay H. gave it a5:
Not much new in this film, you have seen it all before in one shape or form. The acting is okay and it does have some suspenseful moments but overall it's bland. Wes Bentley tries and does well as the psychopath.

Frasier M. gave it an8:
This movie was quite good. It's a real challenge to find a good horror movie anymore. There is either too much gore and/or too bad acting and/or not enough thrills and chills. This movie made me jump a few times, but the reason I didn't give it a full ten points is because of the ending. Happy endings are starting to get annoying, and plus like you wouldn't see a girl in a sleeveless blouse and not stop to ask her if something was wrong. But other than that, great movie. Good acting, good gore level (enough to keep you covering your eyes every now and then, but not enough to go to the bathroom to hurl), and good plot. I don't know about you, but I've never seen a movie where a woman is being stalked in a parking garage!

Chad S. gave it a5:
"P2" is a superior genre picture, a sort of "Red Eye" in a parking garage(in one scene, Thomas(Wes Bentley) gets red eye, literally), that's informed by Quentin Tarantino's "Kill Bill Vol. 1" when Angela(Rachel Nichols) goes all Uma on Thomas' psycho ass. Because of the times, "P2" resorts to the requisite gore to satisfy the core audience, which prevents this sometimes effective thriller from crossing over to a non-teen, non-bloodlust lovin' demographic. At its best, "P2" is a poor, poor, poor man's "Silence of the Lambs". It also makes a salient point about hierarchies in the workplace. Angela is willing to put up with sexual harassment from her boss, but not from a mere parking attendant. The leads, especially Wes "Anything Tobe Maguire Can Do, I Can Do Better" Bentley, do an exceptional job with their respective thankless roles, which should lead to better acting gigs in the future.

Nick F. gave it a2:
Way to ruin Christmas, P2.

Craig A. gave it an8:
If you can't enjoy a great thriller like this, I feel sorry for you. Both this movie, and Hostel 2 have been compared to Saw movies and called inferior to them by so called professional critics! Critics suck so bad! A bit of gore and people crap themselves.

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