Movie Review – Troll 2 (2025)
Principal Cast : Ine Marie Wilmann, Kim S Falck-Joregensen, Mads Sjogard Pettersen, Sara Khorami, Karoline Viktoria, Anne Krigsvoll, Jon Ketil Johnsen, Yusuf Toosh Ibra, Gard B Eidsvold, Ola G Furuseth.
Synopsis: Nora, Andreas and Captain Kris leap back into action when a dangerous new troll awakes – and this time they’ll need more help to take it down.
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Norwegian disaster filmmaker Roar Uthaug returns to ancient mythological legend in his incredibly stylish sequel to Troll, a fun little actioner that delivered rousing spectacle, absurd plotting and a very Scandinavian-centric creature to defeat. I’ve enjoyed following Uthaug’s career as a film director – his breakout film for Western audiences came with 2015’s The Wave, and he platformed his wares honourably with the commendable, yet commercially limp, Lara Croft remake. Uthaug has a keen eye for action and disaster, writ-large destruction marking him as a filmmaker on par with the equally bombastic Roland Emmerich, albeit without the same kinds of budget at his disposal.
Where Troll was an exciting blockbuster-lite romp boasting humour, thrills and a sense of wonder, Troll 2 eschews most of that in favour of absurd dialogue, risible acting and an unremarkable plot that, it should be noted, borrows liberally from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Uthaug and his production team attempt to Marvel-ise the franchise to varying degrees of unsuccessfulness, a tonal pivot that rarely pays off. Written by returning screenwriter Espen Aukan, Troll 2 loses a lot of momentum through silly exposition and attempts at character development that never work, never click, despite the reprisal of the first film’s best characters in scientist-in-name-only Nora Tidemann and writer-of-one-successful-book Andreas Isaksen.
There are in-jokes, sidebar gags and references to the first film and the tropes of disaster-scale cinema generally, but for some reason nothing seems to land genuinely. Awkward scene beats and protracted scowly frowns from most of the cast dominate as the exposition-heavy – and contrivance-heavy – story lumbers towards its foregone conclusion. “Everybody loves sequels!” exclaims one Henry Jones Sr-type character at one point, much to the eye-roll of both the rest of the cast and the viewing audience; such is the maligned nature of the film’s dialogue, this could rank among the better lines uttered by a cast encumbered with absolute timber planks for scripting.
Troll 2 also suffers the ignominy of feeling smaller than its predecessor, rather than bigger and more-ish, as sequels should strive to be. Whereas the first film dealt with a single troll, here there are two of the giant creatures, so you’d expect the film to feel grander, more large-scale, more epic. This isn’t the case. Entire stretches of the film take place across a very small handful of locations, with the climax occurring on a riverbank in the frustratingly where-the-hell-is-this northern Norway city of Trondheim. It’s a city that looks beautiful, but isn’t given a chance to flex its landscape beauty by virtue of the camera remaining fixed on a cathedral and a bridge across a river, and solely those two things. If you’re going to transplant the action from Oslo to a new city, showcase the new city! Don’t just point to it on a map and then barely give us a reason to be worried for its impending destruction.
You’d also think nobody other than the film’s principal characters live in Norway. I know it’s not densely populated, but for the love of god, when there’s an epic crisis you need to show throngs of people hurrying about, escaping and panicking, not a small crowd of fifty gathered around for the world’s worst rip-off of Bill Pullman’s classic monologue from Independence Day. Contrast this against the wonderfully effective production design and blue-ribbon visual effects – notably, the titular trolls are again worth the entrance fee to sign up to Netflix – and you have a film that aches for scope and scale, yet delivers almost nothing of note to remember.
I was thoroughly disappointed with Troll 2. It has its moments, and further develops the hitherto untapped depths of ancient Scandinavian history, myth and legend – the real-world Christianisation of Norway, for example, emerges as a subtextual element I had to Google after watching – but none of the actors are given material worthy of their time. The acting is second-rate, the editing feels jarring at times, and some of the plot points are so diabolically foreshadowed I found myself chuckling at the film rather than with it. If you enjoyed Roar Uthaug’s first outing with Troll, this sequel will likely leave you shaking your head in dismay. Young teenage boys may enjoy it, but viewers with fully formed film appreciation skills will note it as an opportunity well and truly squandered.
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