Scanners II: The New Order

Directed by Christian Duguay, Scanners II: The New Order follows David Hewlett’s David Kellum as he discovers that he possesses dangerous psychic powers and is eventually forced to battle a crooked police commissioner (Yvan Ponton’s John Forrester). It’s perhaps not surprising to discover that Scanners II: The New Order possesses as hit-and-miss a sensibility as one might’ve anticipated, as the movie, which admittedly does boast a promising opening stretch, eventually (and inevitably) progresses into a sluggish midsection riddled with lulls and padded-out sequences – although, by that same token, it’s impossible not to get a kick out of some of the picture’s more blatantly over-the-top episodes. (This is particularly true of a fun interlude wherein Kellum visits a milk-production plant to suss out which employee’s been poisoning the product.) And although Duguay has peppered the proceedings with a few appreciatively violent encounters (eg Kellum foils a convenience-store robbery by exploding the perpetrator’s head), Scanners II: The New Order‘s relentlessly erratic atmosphere does, in the end, ensure that the whole thing peters out rather dramatically long before it arrives at its violent yet anticlimactic finish.

** out of ****