The American Psycho Sequel Was So Bad, Its Star Denounced It

The Big Picture

• American Psycho 2 disrespects the original film by including a weak connection to the character of Patrick Bateman, using severed heads and the face mask for shock value rather than artistic purposes.
• The sequel lacks creativity and charm, failing to recapture the tone and satire of the original. The premise of Rachael killing her competition for a teaching assistant position should have been approached with snarky humor, but it falls flat.
• American Psycho 2 doesn't know who its protagonist is, with Rachael's character changing inconsistently scene by scene. This lack of character development makes the final twist unaffecting, and the film is further plagued by technical flaws and poor music choices.

In 2000, Lionsgate released Mary Harron’s ingenious horror satire American Psycho. Christian Bale, in one of his greatest performances, stars as Patrick Bateman, a Wall Street yuppie who is also (possibly) an accomplished serial killer. Brilliantly weaving humor with genuine terror, American Psycho has endured as a dark comedy classic that remains endlessly relevant because of its cinematic politics. Depending on how someone interprets the film, the movie is all at once a biting critique of capitalism, yuppie culture, whiteness, and masculinity.

In 2002, during the era of the rental store’s Direct-to-Video sequel boom, Lionsgate followed up Harron’s film with a sequel, American Psycho 2 (the film is sometimes subtitled All-American Girl on promotional materials, but the subtitle is not present on the film’s actual title card). Directed by Morgan J. Freeman (no, not that Morgan Freeman), the sequel stars Mila Kunis as Rachael Newman, a university student studying criminology under Professor Robert Starkman (William Shatner). Oh, and yes, she is also a serial killer. But unlike with Patrick Bateman, there are no ambiguities here, either regarding Rachel’s murders or thematic nuance. The mere idea of a sequel to something so singular was enough to make the author of the novel on which the first film is based, Bret Easton Ellis, scoff well before the sequel’s release. Reception in the years following the film’s release has not been kind either, with even Kunis flat-out calling it a bad film and asking for no more sequels to be produced. But just what about American Psycho 2 is so bad that the film’s own star would ridicule it in the immediate years after its release?

American Psycho II: All American Girl

A girl named Rachael Newman has developed a taste for murder and will stop at nothing to become a college professor's assistant.

‘American Psycho 2’ Disrespects the Original

As Kunis has publicly stated, what ended up becoming a sequel to American Psycho was not intended to be related to the original film. While the sequel does not necessarily feel like it was lazily re-edited to be a continuation, there are definitely cracks that exemplify the strained relationship between the two. This is most apparent in how the film deals with the character of Patrick Bateman. In the sequel’s opening prologue, a young Rachael (Jenna Perry) is taped to a dinner table while Bateman (now played by Michael Kremko) kills her babysitter. Able to undo her confines, Rachael breaks free and kills Bateman with an icepick. Now, the issue here is not that Bateman is immediately excised from the narrative. The issue is that the sequel’s version of Bateman is a mere reference to Bale’s fascinating character.

The first shot of the film is Bateman opening the fridge to grab his cooling face mask. When the fridge is open, we see a severed head in the refrigerator. What are supposed to be chilling reminders of the original film come across as nothing more than lifeless callbacks. When a severed head is found in the fridge of Bateman’s apartment in Harron’s film, the head is placed near the back of the shelf, wrapped up, to encourage the viewer to pay attention to the mise-en-scène and look closely at Bateman’s surroundings. In the sequel, the head is placed directly in the foreground with no artistic flourish, only deployed for shock value. The use of the face mask is also incompatible with the original film, as Bateman, in voiceover, described the cooling mask as part of his morning routine, not as part of his killing ritual. The sequel, therefore, shamelessly tries to connect to the first film without even seeming to appreciate it.

The sequel’s treatment of Bateman is especially frustrating when considering that the explicitness of the prologue undoes the narrative ambiguity the first film spent its entire runtime building toward. As other critics have noted, in the second film’s universe, there is no question that Bateman was indeed a serial killer. The original film’s ambiguity required active spectatorship and for viewers to interpret what elements of Bateman’s perspective were real or imagined, contributing to the film’s thematic exploration of perception. By removing any opportunity for interpretation within minutes of the film’s opening, American Psycho 2 disrespects what makes the first film so affecting and primes viewers for the lack of artistry that pervades the sequel.

‘American Psycho 2’ Lacks Creativity and Charm

The film’s lack of creativity is exemplified by American Psycho2’s inability to recapture the tone or recreate the satire of the original film. The driving conflict of American Psycho 2 is that Rachael desperately wants to be Starkman’s teaching assistant because the person in that position usually ends up going to Quantico to train for the FBI. Because she killed Bateman as a child, Rachael has now made it her life’s mission to hunt down other serial killers, and the FBI is, for Rachael, the only way to do that. She then spends the whole film killing her competition for the spot, with only her psychiatrist, Dr. Daniels (Geraint Wyn Davis) on to her. The premise definitely sounds like it could be approached with charming snark. After all, the film’s allegedly vicious killer is killing other undergraduates so they can be a TA.

It should be hysterical that Rachael is murdering people so she can grade papers and check attendance. However, the film weirdly fails to find humor in this scenario. Sure, the significance of the TA position to Rachael is what helps the film depict her as a sociopath, but it is never done in a winking way. Had American Psycho 2 had, say, a scene where each of the contenders for the job compared how they do roll call, there could have been a moment that rivaled American Psycho’s notoriously hilarious business card comparison scene. Instead, the TA position simply serves as Rachael’s motivation.

American Psycho 2’s inability to fuse irony into its premise also means that the film fails to contribute any meaningful cultural commentary. In the most generous of reads, maybe someone could argue that the film is sending up higher education or criticizing law enforcement. But any argument of the sort would be a real stretch. Whereas American Psycho’s approach to slasher conventions was to use the sex and death so often attributed to the subgenre as a comment on the violence and emptiness of consumerism, businessmen, and those in power, the sequel’s implementation of said conventions is mechanical. The film has nothing meaningful to say, so the violence has no lingering impact other than to be violent and said violence is not even shot artfully enough to be shocking.

‘American Psycho 2’ Doesn’t Know Who the Protagonist Is

Because the narrative is constructed without any soul, unsurprisingly, Rachael herself is poorly characterized, to the point that it would be reasonable to wager that one of the flaws Kunis finds in the film is with her own character. It wouldn’t be quite fair to call Rachael one-note; the best way to describe her character would be to call it multiple, incohesive notes. In her introductory scenes, she is supposed to be a “cool girl,” as demonstrated by the already then-dated “Your Mama” joke she spits at a classmate. In some scenes, like when she threatens Starkman after he calls off recruiting for the TA position, she is supposed to be intimidating. In others, like after she kills her classmate Brian (Robin Dunne) by choking him with a condom, she is supposed to be a psychotic jokester (after his body goes limp, she says, “Ribbed. For her pleasure.”)

However, because these traits are deployed based on the needs of the plot at the moment, her characterization seems to change scene-by-scene, without ever following any kind of arc. Unlike in American Psycho, where Bateman’s crippling insecurity and bloodlust simultaneously eat away at him over the course of the film, Rachael is never given any sustained trajectory. For this reason, when the final twist reveals she was impersonating another woman the whole time, there is no solid base character with which to compare her impersonation, rendering the twist unaffecting.

In addition to the film’s disrespectful treatment of the original’s exquisitely crafted character, lack of effective satire, and poor characterization of its protagonist, American Psycho 2 is host to numerous other technical flaws, from lackluster cinematography to repellent music choices. There may be some out there who wish to claim the film as misunderstood. However, with such a parade of problems, American Psycho 2 is hard to even appreciate as a “so bad, it’s good” staple. Instead, the sequel is, and Kunis would agree, so bad, it’s just bad.

American Psycho 2 is available to stream on Peacock.

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