Nine weeks after its opening, there was still a hushed reverence among moviegoers at the Carousel Center 17 on Jan. 17 as a near-capacity crowd of Team Edward and Team Jacob factions settled in for this second cinematic stanza, culled from Stephenie Meyer’s best sellers about thwarted puppy love ’twixt mortals and vampires in Washington state. If it wasn’t for that devoted fan base, these bloodless soap operas would have little to recommend, with vampires who can hang around in the daylight, their skin glistening like Liberace’s sequins, and romancing so chaste that entire families can take in the show without embarrassment.
The May-December love affair between 18-year-old Bella and 109-year-old sawtooth Edward hits an inevitable reality, as depicted in the opening dream sequence. Unless Edward gives Bella a hickey and becomes one of the undead, she’s going to wind up as a platonically devoted but really old broad, while Edward will forever look like Luke Perry Jr. And when Bella’s cut finger during her birthday party triggers some violent reactions amid Edward’s fanged family, Edward declares the relationship far too dangerous to Belle and so he leaves town.
Lovesick Bella, however, learns she can conjure spectral images of Edward whenever she does reckless behavior like cliff diving, perhaps taking a cue from Elvis Presley in Fun in Acapulco. Simmering on the fringes is Jacob, an abs-fab werewolf who becomes the third wheel in this love triangle. Feminists may carp that mopey Bella might be too needful of male companionship, yet the females who have read and reread Meyer’s adolescent-geared page turners have so far not minded at all that their fantasy hunks from the books are incarnated by Pattinson and Lautner.
For 2008’s Twilight, director Catherine Hardwicke accomplished all the heavy lifting, as she set the stately, non-threatening tone for the fantasy franchise without risking the wrath of Meyer’s rabid readership. New-to-the-tentpole director Chris Weitz adheres to Hardwicke’s parameters, thus assuring an earnest yet sometimes ponderous adaptation; if there’s any sense of danger in these movie translations, it’s already been established in the minds of Twilight’s tome raiders. Which means any sort of monstrous mayhem usually takes place off-camera, except when it comes to shirtless smackdowns involving Jacob and his lycanthropic bicep-bulging buddies.
Amid the restrained libidos of this hermetically sealed enterprise, Stewart’s Bella provides a morose center, while Pattinson’s Edward—who has less screen time—is more of a gaunt cipher given to Yogi Berra-isms like “You can’t trust a vampire: Trust me,” and Lautner’s Jacob struts about in cheesecake mode with his rippled physique.
And while Weitz and screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg badly bungle the expository sequences concerning the Volturi, a sect of vampire royalty lurking in an Italian town, that plot detour is where New Moon scores best with its juicy casting. Michael Sheen, a veteran of Frost/Nixon as well as the Underworld flicks, offers the type of overripe villainy that this anemic movie series can use, and Dakota Fanning as Jane, a youthful vamp with ruby-red contact lenses, is wickedly good.
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