Black Nail Varnish

Watched: Influencers 🎬 Opening with beautiful views of the south of France, Influencers lets you know it’s a bigger movie than the original. But it falls into the sequel trap of bloat and over-complication. The antagonist lead, CW, is still a malignant force but she gets a shallow romance arc here that’s 20 minutes of nothing. She’s a psychopath, a malformed mind pushed into the body of an attractive woman in her 30s, her love can only be shallow and self-serving. The attempt to make it something more than that didn’t land for me.

At her best CW is a shark wearing black nail varnish. If she feels joy it’s when she identifies a new target, and with a new set of influencers to rip apart she flourishes. The complication for her is a callback to the prior movie and that part of the story should have gotten more screen time. While this is a messy sequel it’s still worth watching, both movies are a decent weekend binge. I’d watch a third movie, there’s still some juice left in these characters.