Of all the Ring and Sadako related films I've seen, this is the only one that truly isn't scary at all. Many of them are bad, many are underwhelming, but every one has at least a scene here or there that's genuinely scary. None of that here. Most of this movie is just unfunny banter between highly forgettable characters.
This movie deserves some points for at least trying to evolve the concept of the Ring, and doing something new. The curse, or virus, "mutates", meaning the 7 days time frame is now only 24 hours. While this seems an obvious attempt to appeal to Gen Z's short attention spans, it does show at least some attempt at new ideas. There are more ideas like that in the movie, that I won't share, because of spoilers. There are some homages to the original, in the sense that the main characters have to do a lot of detective work to figure out the curse. This gets so specific after a while that I honestly lost the plot for a bit. It even has a call back reference to the small pox virus, as written about in the original novel.
Despite all this, the movie fails at its basic task: scaring the viewer. It seems that the further this franchise goes, the more Sadako becomes just a footnote in her own story. She's hardly even seen in the film, which is mostly taken up by the increasingly elaborate curse and its intricate mechanics.
At the end of the movie, the whole thing turns into a straight up spoof, with the movie itself being keenly aware that it's not being serious anymore. As wacky as some of the other installments are (Looking at you, Sadako 3D number one and two), they were never intended to be funny. This movie clearly is. This is truly a sign that the franchise has lost its way, resorting to comedy out the sheer inability to frighten us any longer.
What a shame.
