No Surrender Cinema: P2 (2007)
This edition of No Surrender Cinema is about to take you on a journey to one of the world’s most dangerous places…a parking garage on Christmas Eve! Finding a spot and fighting traffic will be the least of one woman’s worries, because she’ll be fighting for her life against a psychotic security guard who has eyes for her. Let’s ring in the holiday season with a look back at 2007’s P2!
Angela (Rachel Nichols, who would go one to join the G.I. Joe team two years after P2 when she starred as Scarlett in G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra) works in a Manhattan office building and is trying to wrap up her workday so she can go and join her family for some holiday festivities. After a brief distraction from apologetic co-worker Jim (who is quickly brushed aside by Angela) and a conversation with security guard Karl, Angela heads down to the parking garage (level P2, of course) to find that her car won’t start. Luckily for Angela, socially awkward security guard Thomas (Wes Bentley) is on hand to lend a hand, but his efforts to jumpstart her are for naught. After calling a taxi, Angela finds out that she’s been locked in the building and doesn’t make it out in time to catch the cab. Traveling through the darkness of the garage, Thomas catches up to Angela, only this time he isn’t so helpful because he knocks her out with a heaping helping of chloroform!
Angela wakes up and finds herself trapped in Thomas’ security office, and that he’s gone through the trouble of putting her in a fancy dress and high heels for their “Christmas dinner”. Thomas professes his love for Angela, revealing that he’s been watching her via the security cameras for some time, and has become obsessed with her. Angela pleads for her release, but Thomas’ smitten demeanor is equaled by his psychopathy, and he not only refuses to let her go, but forces her to call her family and feign illness to explain why she won’t be coming home for Christmas.
Even though Thomas is clearly not well, he prides himself as something of a protector, a white knight who feels that he’s just the type of man that Angela needs. Thomas is so steadfast in this belief that he brings Angela down to the lower levels of the parking garage where he’s got her co-worker Jim held captive. It turns out that Jim (who we learned in his brief exchange with Angela is a family man and new father) once drunkenly accosted Angela at a work event, and Thomas witnessed the incident unfold on camera. Thomas’ “present” to Angela is allowing her to get her revenge on Jim, but when she refuses to, Thomas beats Jim (who is duct taped to an office chair and can’t defend himself) with his flashflight, then gets back into the car and drives into Jim, squashing him against the wall of the garage! As Jim’s blood rains down on the windshield of the car, Angela makes her escape, running off into the shadows to find a way out of this nightmare.
Although she makes several attempts to get out of the building, each one is somehow thwarted. First, Angela tries to call 911 from her cell phone, but loses her phone by dropping on the other side of a locked security gate. Then she evades Thomas by getting into one of the elevators (thanks to a set of key cards she snagged from his office), but Thomas one-ups her by flooding the elevator with a fire hose, then drops the dead body of Karl the security guard into the elevator with her! The continuous mental and physical torture finally causes Angela to snap, and she procures an emergency fire axe and proceeds to walk around knocking out all of the cameras so that Thomas can’t watch her any longer, all while he’s lip syncing to Elvis’ “Blue Christmas” as it blares over the intercom. A classic Elvis tune playing while a scantily clad, axe wielding woman decides to turn the tables on her captor is quite the juxtaposition, though I think it would have worked better if it was set to Thomas’ pursuit of Angela as opposed to his silly one-man show.
Just when you think Angela has reached her boiling point, the whole pot boils over when she sees video playing of her in captivity, before she came to. It turns out that “nice guy” Thomas got a little handsy himself, and that image enrages Angela so much that she smashes the screen with the axe! This seems to set the stage for the final showdown between Angela and Thomas, but P2 throws a few more curveballs at us on the way to their fight to the death. We’ve got cops showing up to the scene, Thomas’ Rottweiler trying to make a meal out of Angela, and someone besides Ralphie from A Christmas Story who is in danger of losing an eye on Christmas!
P2 completely bombed upon release, earning under $1000 per screen on it’s opening weekend, ending its theatrical run with a worldwide gross of just under $8 million dollars. I had procured a copy of the film when it first hit DVD (back when I got copies of pretty much every new release), and, full disclosure, the first time I ever watched this movie in full was when I sat down to review it for this column! Even though I had seen bits and pieces on cable over the years, I had no idea this movie was set at Christmas time until I was doing research on action movies and thrillers set during the holiday season! Now that I have seen it, I can’t say there was anything memorable about it aside from Rachel Nichols looking gorgeous in her white dress. Wes Bentley has a knack for playing odd characters, but I think he leaned a little too much into the “nice guy” side of Thomas; we know he’s a sick man but then he talks to Angela like a lovesick puppy. I suppose to some people that makes it feel more “real” that he’s the type of obsessed creep that a lot of ladies will joke about, but he didn’t feel like a very intimidating foil for our heroine.
When it comes to the violence, the makers of P2 certainly got their money’s worth with the blood squibs, but I felt that the gore bordered on excessive. Jim’s death featured his entrails falling out of his body, and a scuffle between Angela and Rocky the Rottweiler gets real bloody, real fast. It’s all a bit gratuitous, but the latter does serve a purpose as it causes Thomas to drop his do-gooder charade momentarily, confirming to Angela that this isn’t a good guy gone bad…this is a lunatic who needs to be dealt with.
Do I regret watching P2? No. Do I regret not watching it sooner? No. It’s an ok enough thriller with a few good moments of tension and an attractive lead actress, but that’s the gist of it. It didn’t break any new ground, and I think Wes Bentley could have played a better psycho. I understand that at the time he was deep into drug addiction and this was one of the films where those issues were causing headaches for the cast and crew, so I guess we can chalk up the results of his contributions to those demons. I’m not sure that this is a film that deserves to be on the list of The Worst Ever, because odds are at some point I’ll end up watching it again; it’s just not something that’s going to be added to my Christmas rotation for the years to come.
P2 is currently streaming on Tubi
