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Twilight Saga: BREAKING DAWN 2

Since the birth of Renesmee
Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson
Directed by Bill Condon

There was some hope for “Breaking Dawn Part 2.” The end of Part 1 had Bella (Kristen Stewart) getting pregnant with what might be a demon offspring while becoming something of a demon herself when Edward (Robert Pattinson) turns her into a vamp. I expected Stephanie Meyers’s so far-overblown book series to finally find some urgency but this may be the worse one yet, because we now know that it was all leading to bupkis, establishing nothing more than what we already knew from the first time these two bores laid eyes on each other in “Twilight.”

Bella now has heightened senses, better jumping ability, and is working on controlling her hunger for humans. Her and Edward have a daughter named Renesmee (Mackenzie Foy) and for some reason Jacob (Taylor Lautner) still hasn’t gotten the hint that he’s lost Bella’s hand for good and should go away now. The storyline here is that Renesmee is mistaken for an immortal, essentially a lethal child, something that gothic vampire dweebs, The Volturi, have sworn death on. Eager to protect her, Bella, Edward, and Jacob ready their troops of about thirty vampires, werewolves and other critters for one final battle.

This is a largely uneventful, almost two hour-long, movie that doesn’t seem to get going until the ending and even then, it makes a show of prolonging the inevitable. That the battle sequence features so many severed and ripped off heads (bloodlessly of course) is quite something but it concludes in a way that’s so disappointing that I actually found a deeper level of loathing for these movies within myself.

And there is so much to hate. Pattinson, Stewart, and Lautner give dull, self-serious performances that only add to the ludicrous nature of the whole thing. The terrible CGI werewolves, the road runner-type way the vampires run around with obvious green screen for a backdrop, the way director Bill Condon has to strain to squeeze out any kind of eroticism out of the PG-13 rating, underwhelming dialogue–you know, the usual flaws of this franchise. Michael Sheen is about the only saving grace here as the head of the Volturi. Otherwise I got the distinct impression that “Breaking Dawn Part 2” is giving the audience the runaround.

Thank God it’s over.