Power doesn't make you good, Dave. It just makes you powerful. And it makes me hungry. I'm gonna suck you dry, pretty boy …"
Scanners II: The New Order arrived a decade after the original. Why so late? I'm sure there are a few reasons, but given the lack of information on the film's production, I am left to hazard a guess. That guess being that the original ended up being enough of a hit on VHS that the producers saw dollar signs and decided to start cranking out DTV sequels. Lucky for me, these are early '90s DTV efforts, so they at least have some budget and effort put into them.
Directed by Christian Duguay (Screamers, Live Wire), our story this time out follows a naïve young scanner named David Kellum (David Hewlett) who is taken under the wing of a high-ranking policeman John Forrester (Yvan Ponton) using a secret taskforce primarily staffed with scanners. These scanners are utilized in a variety of ways. Sometimes it is something as simple is pulling information from a source's head. Other times it goes much farther into amoral territory when suspects are intimated or outright psychically tortured into confessing or placing themselves in a situation where they can legally be executed. At first, David is given smaller tasks that make him feel like he is being helpful and using his powers to make a positive impact on his city. That is, until Commander Forrester coerces David into basically performing a political coup. There's also the sketchy goings on at secret scanner-centric scientific institute, run by Dr. Morse (Tom Butler), and its basement full of drug-addicted imprisoned scanners.
An idealistic, power-hungry cop using scanners to clean up his city and slowly place him in a position to have total control over it is an intriguing idea, one that has a few shades of OCP (Overlord ConSec Police?) to it. Crime is a disease; meet the scanner cure. I just wish the film had devoted more time to it. You have a villain who believes to his core that he is a hero and doing what society needs of him. Those are always the best villains.
Part of me wants to say that I'm not sure Ponton could have pulled it off, but we'll never really know. The film doesn't spend enough time with him. Some of the antagonistic slack is picked up by lackey Peter Drak (Raoul Trujillo), our latest over-the-top renegade scanner. His antics are ham-filled enough to feed multiple families at Christmas, which does bring a good bit of fun to the proceedings when he's on screen. Without the focus dwelling mainly on the A plot, however, it's all spread too thin. Instead of dwelling on the increasingly corrupt decisions and tactics of Forrester (alluded to in Drak's quote at the start) and presenting David as our moral center, it all just gets lost in a myriad of haphazard subplots, many of which just feel tacked on.
In addition to the requisite love story, Scanners II up and decides halfway through that "RoboCop with scanners" isn't a fun enough plot alone and that we should deal with David finding out that he is adopted. And that the original film's protagonists, Cameron Vale and Kim Obrist, are his real parents.* Oh, and he has an older sister that he didn't know about. Who reveals that their parents are dead and were killed by Forrester. Oh, and that her long lost love is one of the aforementioned drug-addicted prisoners in Morse's basement.
Does that sound like a lot of story to juggle? It absolutely is, especially when it is still trying to remain an action-packed thriller on top of it all. It feels like the producers initially wanted to do a TV series (or even a comic) and then once they had the opportunity to make a feature, they jumped at it and crammed it all into one 104 minute film. It's too much. Had it been allowed to play out long-form, the story might have grasped the scope they wanted it to, but it never comes close. Some of the action sequences are fun and the scanner carnage is gleefully wet and wild, but it's not enough for me to recommend that you spend your time on the film.
That might sound like a bummer for the few of you who might be interested in checking out this series as a whole, but there is a light at the end of the tunnel. The first two follow-ups in the series, this and Scanners III: The Takeover, are stand-alone stories. So unless you are OCD about your cinematic explorations like I am, you shouldn't have any problem skipping over this subpar entry. That said, the same creative team put the next one together, so I'm not too hopeful about its potential. Perhaps they learned from their mistakes? Like Scanners II, before this column began, I never had the privilege of seeing Scanners III despite passing it by numerous times on video store shelves. Wish me luck and check back tomorrow for the results!
*There's a line of dialogue that she says to him that made me laugh out loud. She tells David that he "looks so much like father." My initial thought was, "Yeah, he does have a similar bland look to Stephen Lack," before I recalled the ending of Scanners and remembered that Vale ended up inhabiting Darryl Revok's body. This kid doesn't look like Michael Ironside. At all. She should have said he looked like his biological uncle (Cameron's original body), as opposed to the shell of flesh that Cameron transferred into.
