Let ‘Black Phone 2’ go straight to voicemail

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The sequel to the 2021 hit betrays most of what made the first film effective.

There’s a severe disconnect in “Black Phone 2,” and it’s more than just a malfunctioning phone line.

This entirely unnecessary sequel to 2021’s engrossing horror hit ignores just about everything that was effective in the original, most notably its moody atmosphere and its grounding in a recognizable reality. Of course, the child kidnapper known as the Grabber — played by Ethan Hawke in a scarily effective turn — died at the end of the first movie and returns here, so any connection to the real world is tossed out early on.

The Grabber now exists in a dream world, which renders him something of a Freddy Krueger type. And “Black Phone 2” becomes a sort of variant on “A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors,” with characters fighting the bad guy from inside their dreams, which just doesn’t carry the same weight as taking on a real-world demonic figure, who prowls the neighborhood in plain sight. Let this call go straight to voicemail.

We’re back in North Denver and the year is now 1982, and Finney (Mason Thames), who escaped the clutches of the Grabber four years earlier, is now numbing his trauma in a haze of weed smoke and beating up classmates who taunt him about his experience with the serial kidnapper. One thing both “Black Phone” movies get right is the unforgiving cruelty of kids.

Finney’s younger sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw), who has psychic tendencies, receives a phone call from her late mother in a dream, which leads her and Finney to an abandoned Christian youth camp in the Rocky Mountains, where her mother was once a camp counselor. While there, they learn the creepy maintenance guy that used to be on staff resembles a certain neighborhood abductor, which may have something to do with the still-unsolved disappearances of three children at the camp decades prior.

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“Black Phone 2” reunites “Black Phone” writer and director Scott Derrickson with co-screenwriter C. Robert Cargill. But where the first film invested so much time establishing the realism of its late ’70s time period and its setting, “Black Phone 2” misses that sense of worldbuilding, and a sense of purpose along with it. It’s a long time before anything real actually happens.

Derrickson favors extremely grainy visuals for Gwen’s dream sequences, which are made to look like VHS tapes twice dubbed over, but those kinds of effects were put to better use in Derrickson’s own 2012 chiller “Sinister.” Meanwhile, new characters introduced here, including a camp supervisor (Demián Bichir), his neice (Arianna Rivas) and a conservative Christian couple (Graham Abbey and Maev Beaty) don’t add much aside from the couple’s periodic comic relief.

The issue with “Black Phone 2” is its lack of stakes and its wholesale shift to dreamworld logic. The first film had a foot in the supernatural, but audiences are now asked to believe the Grabber is a mythical entity stalking his victims in their slumber, and if they’re harmed in their dreams, they’re hurt in real life. It wasn’t a problem in the “Elm Street” films, because they took the form of supernatural storytelling from the jump, and were slasher showcases all along.

But “Black Phone” was rooted in a tangible evil, from a time when creepy vans driven by suspicious characters were a lingering threat to kids who freely roamed neighborhood streets and didn’t carry communication lines on their person, and the film nailed the feelings and fears of a particular time and place that Gen-Xers knew all too well. Its sequel’s full-on leap into the supernatural betrays the essence of what made the original effective, and robs the movie of its power.

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The bright spot is McGraw, who more than holds her own as she shifts to co-lead. Her sassy, profanity-laced barbs grow tiresome, but she delivers them with moxie, and she’s a credible presence against the threat of the Grabber, in dreams or not. “Black Phone 2” isn’t worth answering, but McGraw holds the line all her own.

agraham@detroitnews.com

‘Black Phone 2’

GRADE: D+

Rated R: for strong violent content, gore, teen drug use, and language

Running time: 114 minutes

In theaters