The Twilight Saga: New Moon continues the impossible love story between teenager Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) and Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson), a vampire in the body of a preternaturally pale Ralph Lauren model, almost 100 years her senior.
It's bad enough that Edward can't decide whether he wants to kill her or kiss her, but when his adoptive brother Jasper (Jackson Rathbone) almost eats Bella after she suffers a paper cut at her 18th birthday party, Edward decides that the best thing for the woman he loves is to leave her.
Enter Jacob Black (Taylor Lautner).
Yeah, I know the character was introduced in the last movie as Bella's shy and slightly awkward childhood best friend.
Trust me, this isn't the same guy. When Lautner, who reportedly put on 30 pounds (13 kilos) of muscle for the bulked-up role of someone who has just found out he's a teenage werewolf, takes off his shirt in the movie, the audience let out something between a gasp and a scream.
It was like nothing I have ever heard in any horror movie. The kid's abs are the best special effect in the movie. And that's counting the digital transformation sequences from boy to wolf, which are none too shabby and a distinct improvement over the effects in Twilight.
Increasing danger
Jacob, who's genial where Edward is moody, easy where Edward is tortured, mends Bella's broken heart, or tries to. Haunted by vivid visions of her lost lover, especially when she's in jeopardy, Bella begins to deliberately put herself in ever more increasing danger as a way to conjure Edward, if only in her head.
When she dives off a cliff, only to be rescued by Jacob, Edward mistakenly believes Bella is dead. He resolves to kill himself the only way a vampire can, by turning himself in to the Volturi, an elite body of European vampires who make vampire rules and execute those who violate them. Which is what Edward plans to do by exposing himself as a vampire to the mortal world.
Sound a little like Romeo and Juliet, or its spinoff West Side Story? It should. At times, the duelling fashion sensibilities of the werewolf pack (who look like they stepped from the pages of an Abercrombie & Fitch catalogue) and Edward's vampire family (who seem to shop at Barneys) are like the Sharks and the Jets, only with better stylists.
Look, there's nothing terribly serious or heavy going on in New Moon, despite a lot of nonsense in the screenplay (written by Melissa Rosenberg and directed by Chris Weitz) about souls and damnation. The performances are uniformly strong, especially by Stewart, who is turning into a fine young actress. Despite melodrama that, at times, is enough to induce diabetes, there's enough wolf whistle in this sexy, scary romp to please anyone.
