Metacritic Film

P2

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

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

Summit Entertainment
Horror  |  Suspense/Thriller
98 minutes | Color
USA
Released In Theaters November 9, 2007

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)

WRITTEN BY
Alexandre Aja
Franck Khalfoun
Gregory Levasseur

DIRECTED BY
Franck Khalfoun

Overall Metascore

This is a weighted, normalized average of all individual scores given by critics, on a scale of 0 (worst) to 100 (best).

37 / 100

Critic Reviews

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.
70 Washington Post Mike Mayo
If in the end P2 contains few surprises, it's still a nice piece of polished escapism.
63 ReelViews
P2 doesn't crash and burn, but its finale is more generic than what the effective first hour leads us to hope for.
60 The New York Times
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.
58 Seattle Post-Intelligencer
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).
50 TV Guide
No two ways about it: The screenplay is derivative. But the location adds a little novelty to the standard-issue running and screaming.
50 San Francisco Chronicle
Standard-issue slasher pic.
50 The Hollywood Reporter
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.
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.
40 Austin Chronicle
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.
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.
25 New York Post
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.
25 The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Jason McBride
A pointless thriller.
16 Baltimore Sun Robert Abele
Has the feeling of something done many times before.
0 Boston Globe
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.

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