Python 2 (2002)

Plot
Another top secret military project has been discovered in a remote part of Russia - a giant genetically engineered python. The snake is kept inside an underground military base but the Americans want it back and send a small group of mercenaries in to take the snake back. They hire an American truck driver who operates in the area to ferry the snake back to the US. But when they reach the base, they realise that the snake has escaped, killing everyone there. Now it's a race against time to get out alive before the entire base is bombed from the air.

Review
Not content with ruining the reputation of CGI snakes everywhere, the brains behind Python are back with the originally titled Python 2. But there's a catch - there are actually two snakes in the film! Get it? It's the second film in the series and there are two snakes! Ingenious! I guess there are no real surprises here. You have a CGI crap fest of a film about a genetically engineered snake on the loose and fill the cast with a few names like Robert Englund and Casper Van Dien to try and draw the crowds. That's fair enough. Python was acceptable. To go ahead and make a sequel to a film not that many will have watched anyway just reeks of desperation. To have it star one of the minor characters of the original obviously to add a bit of continuity is shambolic!

Python 2 doesn't really need me to bash the film too much as it does most of that itself without knowing. It's got a really piss-poor opening sequence with a bunch of supposed soldiers using supposed high-tech equipment to track down the snake. You can almost see into the future here, as the guy in charge sends soldiers with no names to proceed onwards to investigate sounds and you know full well what is about to happen. Why the snake is loose in Russia is never answered nor is any attempt made to explain why the Americans want it back. Just accept it! But moments after it has been recaptured, the damned plane it's being transported in is shot down by Russian terrorists. So you'd think the terrorists would open the container themselves? Wrong. Moments later a squad of Russian soldiers wipe out the entire terrorist cell and take control of the container once more. But the Russians don't think to report their finds back to their superiors, they just stash it away in their underground base. This round robin of snake-possession gets boring quickly, simply because the film is stop-start. Just when you think it's going to settle down and actually have the snake escape, it continues to pull the rug out from underneath. Finally though the snake is released and bad CGI carnage commences. But do we really need to have the whole truck driver and mercenary group being offered up as the victims when, instead, the snake has a whole Russian base to munch through which happens off-screen? Body count boosting is a pretty shallow ploy in these type of films, none more so than here. You've got the male hero, the hot female in distress, the shady government op and one of the hero's friends (sorry mate, you're too nice to survive these films) but apart from that the rest of the mercenaries are just there for fodder. In a slight turn of events, it turns out that our male hero is in fact a famously washed up baseball player who fled America after an incident during a game. What the hell? It's a totally pointless subplot.