Mai Takano (Nakatani Miki), the assistant/girlfriend of the professor and “ex” in Ringu joins with a journalist colleague of the reporter from Ringu to investigate the strange occurrences around a video tape that kills anyone who watches it seven days later. When Yoichi, the child from Ringu, starts exhibiting strange powers, Mia and a scientist decide to drain off the “evil energy” using psychic power, scientific equipment, and a swimming pool.
Ringu introduced J-Horror, a subgenre with compelling characters, nerve-racking concepts, and real frights. Ringu 2 offers up one-dimensional, third-banana characters from the first film in a bland plot that couldn’t scare an anxiety ridden mouse in a catnip canning factory, and serves it up with more techno-babble than ten Star Trek episodes focusing on Data.
Initially, Ringu was released with Rasen, a sequel based on the novels. While Ringu was a hit, Rasen left audiences cold, so director, Hideo Nakata, and screenwriter, Takahashi Hiroshi, were given the task of creating a replacement sequel that varied from Rasen, but did not contradict it. This third Ring-series film of 1998 strove for continuity by following two characters that were of no interest in the first film and continue to be of no interest here. They didn’t bother with plot continuity as evil-ghost-girl Sadako now has a brand new bag, possessing young Yoichi for no particular reason with powers that weren’t apparent before. As for the tape, that is ignored.
Thus begins the achingly slow tale of timid Mia, who, like every third character in this version of Japan, has psychic powers, but has no stake in anything that happens. She hasn’t seen the tape, isn’t haunted, isn’t going to be killed, and has no connection with Yoichi. It’s a little tricky figuring what she is doing in the film at all.
But then this isn’t a film about characters. It’s a film about absurd scientific gibberish. You see, the ghost is really evil energy (a commonly known scientific quantity which can be measured) and fresh water is a superior conductor of evil energy when compared to salt water, because…because… Well, they really don’t say, but it makes as much sense as anything else in this film. So, after a great deal of talking (man, do these people talk) about spirit photography, background information that strips Sadako of everything that made her frightening, and unnecessary psychology, we’re left with one of the dumbest lab scenes put to film as our personalityless scientist wires up Mia (with his psychic energy conducting wires?) and Yoichi (with his evil energy conducting wires?) to a bunch of machines that came from the 1960s but apparently have gauges for ghostly resistance. There’s no way to take this seriously, but no one who made this mess realized that.
Ringu 2 wastes some time on some police that end up doing nothing, and on Reiko Asakawa, who, as the lead in Ringu, really should have done something, but doesn’t.
The only redeeming quality is that it is so silly that it can easily be ignored.