The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 2 (2012) - Review

What a great lifelike doll they got!

Let's not beat around the bush here; this is Twilight.  You already know what I and every other critic on the entire planet think about the series:  it's a vapid, soulless, humorless, badly-made mess of a franchise.  And you can start with the poster to the left done in photoshop in about six minutes.  That's problem numero uno: laziness.

So you know it's bad.  It's awful.  But HOW awful is the question.  Could it really be worse than the others?  Well, yes and no.  On one hand, it may very well be the worst of the series as far as content goes.  There is some truly abhorrent stuff in here (the biggest offender being a CGI'd baby face which I could write a whole review about, but I'll just leave it here and say that you HAVE to watch the movie just for this one effect; I'm not even kidding, watch this movie and see how bad this effect is, it's mindblowing), but most of it is pretty funny, in stark contrast to Breaking Dawn Part 1 (which was just super boring).

Twilight: the Full House of vampire movies

One thing I do want to talk about is that this is supposed to be the huge finale -- the big climax that everything previous has been leading up to.  Some sort of showdown with the shadowy and overly effeminate Volturi vamps, perhaps?  Well, this movie has one of the biggest anticlimax copouts I've ever seen, and I'm going to spoil it for you because it's just THAT bad.  So stop reading if you don't want to know.

Gone?

Okay, well here's the big twist.  There IS a final battle in which there's lots of fighting and a bunch of people die.  Sure, it looks awful (seriously where did their budget go?), but it's at least there.  Only it's not.  It turns out, the entire fight scene climax takes place in the mind of the psychic character.  When they see that there would be an inordinate amount of bloodshed and basically everyone dies, they course correct the future and the movie ends without incident.  Seriously?  That's like if the Emperor thought Luke was going to beat him so he's like "nah man, you keep on keeping on, bro, we don't gotta fight".  Preeeeeetty lame, guys.

And that's the most interesting thing about the movie.  The rest is about Edward and Bella's kid learning how to be a vampire and growing crazy fast.  There's some ultra boring werewolf stuff and Jacob's in love with Bella's kid which isn't creepy at all.  Ultimately everything ends up pretty happy.  Vampire fiction shouldn't really end "happy"; it kind of destroys the whole angsty purpose, but even if you must end it happily, you could at least EARN your happy ending.  Oh well, at least the series is over.  Now we only have the millions of copycats to endure.