P2 (Film Review)

2007 Summit Entertainment
Directed by: Franck Khalfoun; Written by: Alexandre Aja, Franck Khalfoun, and Grégory Levasseur
Starring: Rachel Nichols and Wes Bentley
MPAA Rating: R; Running Time: 98 Minutes
The Nicsperiment Score: 6/10

Angela Bridges is working the Manhattan high rise grind, putting in the hours even into a Christmas Eve night where one of her coworkers has made an unwanted aggressive pass at her. When she finally decides its time to leave for her sister's Christmas party, her car won't start. The underground parking garage security officer, Thomas, seems eager to help, though...a little too eager. Before she knows it, Angela has been chloroformed and chained to a chair in Thomas' office, with a guard dog standing by. Turns out, all the crazed Thomas wants for Christmas is Angela.
The advertisements for P2 back in 2007 kept the message simple: the girl in this movie has really big boobs. Indeed, P2 star, Rachel Nichols, does have very big boobs  and for much of the film she wears a dress that is so low cut and so tight, her areolas are sometimes peeking. However, it takes more than boobs alone to put butts in seats, and P2 flopped at the box office, which is a shame, because, boobs or not, it's a solid little thriller.
Director, Franck Khalfoun, does a great job of presenting the setting before Angela is trapped in it, and also of making a horror film whose color scheme isn't grey--despite the fact that P2 is mostly set in a parking garage, there's still a lot of color. Khalfoun also does a great job of diversifying the concept as presented by the marketing and plot synopsis. The film isn't just a girl with big boobs getting stalked by a psycho. Other characters are still in the building, or come into the building and are involved. This gives Khalfoun a chance at a higher body count, and thus the opportunity to showcase a surprising amount of gore, guts, brains, and fingernails. Turns out P2 is surprisingly gruesome, but in...well, if you like horror movies, in a fun way, not in a torture porn way.
As Angela, Nichols is a solid lead. At times she is quite good and a very robust and likable heroine, but at others, particularly when she's tasked with spouting a one-liner, she's a little flat. Wes Bentley is also solid as the evil Thomas, though the character doesn't quite work. He's clearly a sociopath who is very clever and resourceful, but at other times, he comes off as a simpleton. The film would work a little better if it made even a minimal effort to explain why Thomas is suddenly deciding to partake in this level of villainy. Even just alluding at his motivations or that he's done things like this before (maybe in other buildings) would go far in adding a little bit of depth to the film, and adding an extra 30 seconds to a minute would do little to neutralize P2's lean charms, as the film would still run less than 100 minutes. So while P2 may not be a great film, it is fun, invokes a nice feeling of 2000s slime, and I'd definitely watch it again.