I Can Stay Here in This Parking Lot All By Myself

As a life long suburban dweller, I really do not have much experience with parking decks and even most of them have been above ground, accessed in the daylight or overcrowded at the end of a ball game. Come to think of it, the only time I have been in an underground parking deck may have been playing Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. So P2, a suspenseful thriller about being confined to an underground parking deck, really isn’t up my alley.

Despite taking place on Christmas Eve, the timing had to do more about picking a day where no one would be there late (sans our heroine of course), than making this a holiday theme thriller, granted a well placed Blue Christmas is used. The protagonist in question is Rachel Nichols (Dumb and Dumberer: When Harry Met Lloyd) who plays the damsel is distress quite well in a how does she not pop out of that dress with all that action going on kind of way.

She is put into that dress by lowly parking attendant Wes Bentley (Soul Survivors) who takes matters into his own hands when Nichols laughs off his suggestion of eating Christmas dinner with him when her car doesn’t start as the last one out of the parking deck. Needless to say Bentley meticulously planned everything to keep Nichols inside the building locking all the exits with the underground dwelling helping out with the bad cell phone reception.

But as Nichols breaks free, the movie turning into a slow moving, literally, Bentley goes after her with Jason Voorhees-like speed throughout the whole movie, plot with somewhat interesting encounters, like when Nichols finds a ax or is stuck in an elevator, buffered by boring cat and mouse games. It is hard to tell what is more to blame, Bentley, who cannot command a movie when he is one of only two people on screen, or the screenwriters who thought the location of a darkly lit underground place could write itself as a horror flick that they skimp on actual thrills, but P2 may have been an idea best left on the drawing board.

P2 gets a on my Terror Alert Scale.