Unfriended: Dark Web

FILM REVIEW

Unfriended: Dark Web “You have my laptop,” texts the unknown, clearly ticked off antagonist in Unfriended: Dark Web. “I want it back.”

What I wouldn’t give for it to be Liam Neeson. Alas, the nascent franchise can’t afford him. And even though the actor had halfa-dozen screen credits last year, and an equal number in production, it’s unlikely he would have stooped to appear in this low-budget fright-fest.

The first Unfriended, released in 2015, was a clever twist on the foundfootage genre, with everything happening in real time on a computer monitor that filled the movie screen. Made for $1 million, it grossed more than $30 million. It was original and amusing. Also, it had a ghost.

Dark Web reboots everything, with a new writer/ director (Stephen Susco, who wrote the U.S. remake of The Grudge), fresh meat (Colin Woodell, Stephanie Nogueras and some others you’ve also never heard of ) and a kind-of new plot. Once again the action takes place on a computer screen, but this time the malevolent force is not an evil spirit but some dark web types who all seem to go by the name Charon.

Woodell plays Matias, who lost my sympathy in the first five minutes when I saw that his user name was “mattyfastwheelz.” (That zed; ugh.) He’s just booted up his new computer, which he lifted from the lost-andfound of a nearby café after no one had claimed it for several weeks.

Matias is trying to impress his deaf girlfriend (Nogueras) with a real-time English-to-ASL translator. He’s also skyping with several buddies who have gathered for an online game night.

But he’s soon distracted by a hidden cache of grainy torture videos on the computer’s hard drive — the violence is brief and fairly bloodless — and by insistent messages that he identify himself and return the machine to its rightful owner. (You know it’s serious when texts arrive in black bubbles and all-caps.)

Don’t worry if you have no idea what the dark web is; the movie doesn’t have much to go on either, aside from a creeping suspicion that it’s dangerous, allpowerful and unforgiving. Kind of like Liam Neeson, except, to be clear, he isn’t in this movie.

Instead we get a lot of techno-babble about administrator privilege and bitcoin, and an amusingly low-res river Styx simulacrum that looks to have been designed in Minecraft. Matias’s computer crashes several times trying to make sense of it all, and with it so does the film.

Viewers may too, if they pitch their expectations too high. ★★ Unfriended: Dark Web opens across Canada on July 20.