SLC Punk 2 {Punk's Dead} (2016)

Punk's Dead; SLC Punk 2 (R)

"Only posers die"

Of all the crowd funded, nostalgia-glomming and remake raping that the film scene perpetrates now, nothing takes the crappy cake quite like SLC Punk 2, aka Punk's Dead.   So, how dead is it?

If the ultimate message of SLC Punk! was the inevitability of selling out in modern society to survive, then SLC Punk 2 shows just how damaging artistically it can be to do so.  Watching this film leaves one with the impression that maybe you're better off freezing to death than living.  One half of the movie, the better half,  focuses on a carload of teenaged punks, some goth some hardcore some straight edge, crossing back over county lines into Salt Lake City for a concert while.  One, Ross, is suffering from heart break of a very stereotypical nature.  Along the way they get drunk, do drugs, fight redneck fathers and barely act their way out of their cliched paper bags.  However, let's not focus on them; at least they are young and inexperienced and serve some reason for the film to have been made (misguided though it may be).  Meanwhile the film is haunted by the ghost of Heroin Bob (Goorjian) who provides us context (hah!) exposition (haha!) and the strongest tie to the original movie (sad face).

Bob, with an ill fitting bald cap/mohawk, is now the narrator of SLC2 (Matthew Lillard reportedly refused to appear in the sequel, good call Matt).  One of the young punks, Ross, is his son who he fathered with Trish, and so Bob paces about oblivion in his combat boots offering his opinions on the state of his family and society.  This is the only part of the film that even barely resembles the original film.  Joining Bob in SLCP2 are also our old friends Sean, Eddie and John the Mod, aka, the only other actors unwisely willing to return for the sequel.  They are given a few useless lines (and reportedly paid next to nothing for doing so), and have their beloved characters dragged through the mud (John a sleazy internet porn tycoon?).  They sit in obvious, flat sets or in the back of cheap rented limos and read as much time-filling mush of dialog as the director can give them to fill in the holes between Bob and his kids.  Meanwhile, the concert they are all meeting at not only looks and sounds terrible, it was a kickstarter "bonus" to backers and is given so much screen time its almost another character.  A character every bit as terrible as the rest in the movie, both in conception and portrayal (betrayal)?  Compare, for instance, the Sean character's amusing anecdotes from both movies:  SLC1: the acid flashback, the homelessness, Sean is a funny yet tragic tale of youth gone awry.  In SLC2 he is a lawyer (somehow) who steals a cop's bike in a scene that is painfully, systematically unfunny.  The only thing laughable in that scene is how inept it is.

Gone is the intelligence, the wit, the energy, the newness, the raw camera work, the snappy conversations, the pastiche of film, even the underground music!  In it's place are bad wigs on top of unpracticed performers stiffly reading a bad script in a bad movie that shovels in as much concert footage as it can to pad it's run time.  If SLC Punk! hadn't been such an artistic success, would Punk2 be as Dead as it is here, visually decomposing the good will from the first to fleece the good memories and bank accounts of the original's devotees?

If Punk is dead you'll have to ask returning writer/director James Merendino.  Who killed it James?

2 No Stevo, No Shooter, No Service out of 10 (AWFUL)