The Pitch: Having a prime number of cameras was never going to work.
I'll say this much. 14 Cameras is an
improvement on what I didn't like about 13 Cameras.
Someone took note of all the issues with 13 and
attempted to address them in 14. The creepy landlord (I refuse to learn his
name) seems way more competent. His operation makes a lot more sense. He has
better cameras. He's figured out that he should avoid meeting people
face-to-face, because they would quickly identify that he looks like a villain
in a horror movie. He can fund his hobby by posting the camera feeds to cam
sites on the dark web*. The fact that he's keeping women trapped long term not
inside the houses suggest that his recording and protectiveness is some sort of
grooming process. The whole obsession makes a lot more sense now. I get how
he's pulling it off.
*"Dark web" in this apparently just means
a lot of DOS screens which, for all I know, could be pretty accurate.
Except, that I don't still. A lot of my questions
from 13 are answered or resolved, but a whole slew of new questions
replace them in 14. The two biggest questions I have are about the women
he abducted in the first movie and her son, who he is raising as his own.
1) The son. The kid is way too well adjusted. He
should either be feral or more should be done to explain why he isn't. As much
as I'd like to sing the praises of TV, no kid could be raised on neglect and TV
and come out as relatively normal as this kid does. Just ask The Cable Guy.
2) The mother. That kid is pushing 8 at absolute
minimum. So, the mom has just been trapped in a pit for a decade, occasionally
eating hamburgers? Nope. I'm not remotely buying that. The conditions are too
severe for her to last that long and look that healthy. More importantly, it
proves far too easy to escape it. Surely, she, or one of the other women he's captured
must've come up with a better plan in this very long amount of time.
(A side question that I want to know the answer to
but I'm glad the movie didn't: Why is he keeping these women prisoner? He
doesn't really do anything with them the whole time. No weird sex stuff. No
delusional belief that they have a relationship. He just sort of has them
there to sometimes feed them)
I liked the landlord's victims more this time. The
cheating husband angle in the last movie was one distraction too many. This time,
it's just a fairly boring family. Amber Midthunder, who I already like from the
FX series Legion, is pretty good as the daughter's friend and primary
infatuation of the landlord. The family's story stayed pretty simple. The movie
trusted that the landlord recording them and the dark web eventually turning on
him was enough plot for the movie.
Which, I guess I could bring that up. I find it funny
(and a little depressing) that even when a movie tries to be pessimistic about
internet culture, they still give it too much credit. So, the chatroom that the
landlord host is the kind of place where people eventually turn to paying
others to abduct the girls in the video. If I'm willing to accept that idea in
the world of this movie, then the sad truth is, it wouldn't've taken several
days to get to that point. Like, a day, max. Furthermore, this can't be the
first time that's happened. The landlord cannot be so surprised when the
conversation went that way, and he must be more prepared to shut it down. He's
been too deep in this world for too long for him to be blindsided by its
depravity.
For a movie like this, I have a rule of thumb that's
a combination of the Peter Principle* and "only the poor criminals get
caught". The idea is that criminals escalate the level of crime they commit
with until they reach their level of respective incompetence. So, you don't
hack the Pentagon before first proving you can hack a personal blog. You commit
serial sexual assault unless you first steal some underwear. Start small, and
if you succeed at that, aim bigger, and eventually you'll overstep. Applied to 14
Cameras, the landlord character is the equivalent of a guy who should be
robbing liquor stores somehow reaching a level of robbing banks. I don't
understand how he's gotten successful at all this. He's very sloppy and not
very savvy. Certainly he would've messed up long before he got to this level.
As I mentioned in the first movie, he only got away then thanks to dumb luck.
He isn't presented as being particularly sly or clever, so how did he keep this
going for the better part of a decade? Surely there were many mistakes along
the way. In a horror/scary movie like this, if I don't believe that the villain
could pull off what he's doing, that takes away the stakes for the entire
movie. And a horror movie without stakes is boring.
*The Peter Principle is an observation that the
tendency in most organizational hierarchies, such as that of a corporation, is
for every employee to rise in the hierarchy through promotion until they reach
a level of respective incompetence.
Verdict: Strongly Don't Recommend
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