I spent the first half of this movie convinced that Lars von Trier had finally descended into sheer pointless brutality. And, granted, even after it drastically changes character into a completely different film by the end, and has spent a lot of time on digressions about the meaning of art, I’m still not sure “Human Centipede 2” would have been any different, if it had had the scantest of art-house pretensions and a couple of philosophical digressions. But, damn, LvT is still an incredibly talented director, and by the end, Matt Dillon’s repulsive, unsympathetic performance starts to look like the role of his career. Leave it to LvT to once again, as he did with the totally unenjoyable masterpiece Antichrist, show that cinematic greatness and entertainment are not necessarily related even in passing. I just hope he’ll stop trying to prove that morality isn’t necessarily related either—I feel like the point has been made. Still, he’s once again landed within the realm of where I had to grudgingly say I must respect, maybe even liked, the film. Eventually. But I totally understand the walkouts at Cannes, and though I suspect LvT had enjoyed so successfully tricking people into missing what they wound up missing, I do wonder if that’s a director’s job. Whatever redeeming qualities it may have, if it has any, show up strictly in the second half, maybe even just within the last third or quarter. It takes a really long time before this film even remotely tips its hand where it’s going, or that it might actually have something to say. Not surprisingly for LvT, this movie actually left me in a place where I didn’t feel like moving on to watch another horror movie after it, a rare thing for me, and probably some kind of testament to his skill as a filmmaker, no matter how exploitative a lot of this movie seemed.
