Fall 2: Deadpoint Film Review – Drops Dead

Visually uninteresting, poorly paced, and plagued with horrendous ADR, Fall 2: Deadpoint leaves you on a low note.

Grieving her sister Hunter (Virginia Gardner, of Halloween), Jax (Harriet Slater, of Tarot) bonds with her bold friend, Luce (Arsema Thomas, of Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story). As a way to honor Hunter’s memory and help Jax face her fears and grief, they decide to climb the dangerous Mount Kwan in Thailand with the aid of a local guide (Tom Brittney, of Back in Action). But things turn south when a rockslide traps them on a narrow plank 4,000 feet up.

I don’t mean it lightly when I say that Fall 2: Deadpoint might be amongst the worst studio tentpoles I’ve seen since Madame Web. The movie is visually uninteresting, with editing that makes it feel longer than it is, plagued with horrendous ADR work, and, to top it off, it asks you to sympathize with some of the most obnoxious and selfish leads I’ve seen all year. It’s hard to immerse yourself in the narrative—if you can even call it that—when screenwriters Jonathan Frank and Scott Mann, and directors Michael and Peter Spierig are working overtime to force a connective tissue between both movies that simply does it a disservice rather than any favors.

Fall 2: Deadpoint highlights the obsession with creating social media content, no matter the consequences, which the first one tried and failed to comment on as well, with Hunter convincing her best friend Becky (Caroline Currey, of Shazam) to climb up a tower to spread her dead husband’s ashes and film content for her climbing channel. The world seems to be romanticizing Hunter’s death in the sequel, making it harder for Jax to grieve her properly, given their estranged relationship before her passing.

On paper, it’s not a bad idea for a sequel, if you really want to link it to its predecessor. But besides a brief montage depicting the internet’s fascination with Hunter, the movie doesn’t engage with this idea. Instead, it spends most of its first act trying to justify why Jax—who hates all the high-adrenaline activities her sister stood for—would agree to climb a mountain to “honor” Hunter. What’s the movie’s answer to this? Luce, who selfishly uses the circumstances Jax is in to have them visit Mount Kwan so she can scratch one more location off Hunter’s bucket list and disguise the trip as a healing experience for Jax.

Her lack of morals could have created gripping tension, especially since they’re stuck on the side of a mountain and forced to face their differences. But the movie never actually confronts Luce for her actions. If anything, it celebrates them by validating the forced journey Jax is placed in, since she does overcome her fears. The whole thing feels tone-deaf concerning the support system around a grieving person, made worse by a nonsensical twist that I won’t dive into due to spoilers.

Perhaps if Jax herself were an interesting character, I would be more forgiving of Fall 2: Deadpoint. Unfortunately, she’s just as odd a protagonist. Quite early, Jax’s guilt is established. She never got to make amends with her sister, and their last conversation ended with Jax saying something really hurtful. Not a bad start, even if it’s painfully cliché. Where things get weird is how she blames the flawed relationship with Hunter on Becky. She resents that Hunter paid more attention to her best friend than to her little sister. Rather than making Jax endearing or relatable, it makes her look immature and, at times, unhinged.

Fall 2: Deadpoint is not smart enough to keep things simple. It injects unnecessary twists and turns that make it feel overstuffed for easy shock value. Drug tracking is part of this sequel, for whatever reason, adding one more unnecessary threat our two leads must deal with in the climax. As if having a near-death experience wasn’t enough.

While this extra layer of plot is kind of amusing from an absurd standpoint, there is no world where a set of people who barely survived climbing up a mountain would stop to moralize the production and distribution of fentanyl. It’s stuff like this that does make Fall 2: Deadpoint almost reach a “so bad is good” quality. However, no matter how hilariously bad the third act is, it can’t save the dullness of the two acts that precede it.

Fall 2: Deadpoint is now available to watch in theaters.