Skyline has a severe case of unlikeable characters; And as it's a movie that asks us to spend a lot of time with them... well, it absolutely is a deal-breaker. Seven years after that, writer Liam O'Donnell returned with a sequel, this time as a director as well. His fix for the first movie's problems? Casting Frank Grillo as the lead. Problem solved.
It helps that O'Donnell keeps the character drama to a bare minimum, as this time around the script seems to recognize we're here for the alien invasion thread, not some idiot bickering. But Grillo is always an asset - it's not just that he's a very credible action protagonist, his world-weary pleasantness gives the movie a huge boost. I couldn't be arsed to give half a nugget of shit about any of the bozos in the first movie, but Grillo's easy charisma got me invested in his (fairly standard) family problems almost immediately.
He plays Mark Corley, an LA cop who's on a never-explained hiatus. He's just picked his son Trent (Jonny Weston) from the department, a surly twenty something with attitude problems, and is on his way home in the subway when the alien invasions from the first movie hits the city. (Having recently watched Skyline, it seems to me that the subway looks a little too busy for the early AM - but as the script soon makes clear, this is not a film that's particularly concerned with plausibility. Fair enough!)
The switch in perspective to allow us to witness the invasion from a ground level is a pretty cool idea, and the first act of this movie is basically a streamlined version of Skyline once it finally got going: a group of survivors evading the aliens to get to an extraction point. We get the Cliff's notes to the alien capabilities: a hypnotic blue light that lures helpless humans to their tractor beams, large humanoid tanks (yes, the big aliens are basically mechs) and a large human-harvesting mothership that can rebuild itself after a direct hit from a nuke (spoilers for Skyline). It's a distilled version of the first movie's events, better in pretty much every respect, not the least because all the character drama goes out the window in favour of action-movie interactions. Mark and Trent are joined by a cute TSA employee (Bojana Novakovic, who was so good in The Hallow; She's pretty much reduced to eye candy here) and a blind veteran (Antonio Fargas).
The extraction fails miserably, leaving a reduced cast abducted in the mothership. After a crash landing the action moves to the jungles of Laos, where Mark teams up with local drug traffickers (which include Iko Uwais and Yayan Ruhian!) to (in no particular order) save his son, whose brain has been transferred into an alien drone, protect the daughter of the protagonists of the first movie, whom we meet as a baby and is growing at an exponential rate, and finally maybe find a way to defeat the aliens. No pressure.
Like the first movie, this is a budget effects showcase which relies a little too much on CGI. But in pivoting towards being a more of a straightforward action vehicle*, this sequel gains a sense of fun. The hand-to-hand action is very decent; O'Donnell's penchant for more immediate, unstable handheld takes doesn't show it very well, and the fights are almost always with CGI-enhanced aliens against blue screens - but the choreographies, which seem to have been devised by Uwais, Ruhian and their frequent collaborator Very Tri Yulisman, are fast and brutal. There are a few pretty cool stunts, including people being thrown through walls and furniture, which is always cool.
The shootouts aren't quite as good, with the guns themselves feeling very underpowered (must be a trade-off for having infinite ammo), and no squibs, just CGI. Speaking of, most of the blood is done in post-production, and it looks particularly terrible. The alien vehicles and creatures are still cool, although the focus on quantity of F/X shots over quality means that some of their big scenes are a little ropey. Still pretty impressive for its budget level, mind.
We also get a little exposition on the alien invasion and why they're going around harvesting people and using our brains to run their machines - it's not good sci-fi by any stretch, but I appreciate they're making an effort. Also appreciated: the craziness of the endings on both movies, with this one following up on the fate of the baby Mark was protecting in an awesomely batshit (if iffily rendered) epilogue.
I can't resist a movie where someone gets their arm torn off and they just keep fighting with their other one. Beyond Skyline is a solid B-movie elevated by some choice craziness and a lot of energy. I may have jumped the gun on revisiting the series - the fourth one, which will feature a Debt Collectors reunion to add to its The Raid reunion, will apparently only come out in 2025 - but until then, I guess I have one more to look forward to.
*:Relatively straightforward - it's still about an American ex-cop teaming up with a Laotian drug cartel to fight off an alien invasion.
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