by Jenson Davenport
Humans love the number three. It’s the perfect number, offering us a sense of harmony and comfort. This specific psychological obsession often finds itself naturally transposed into cinema, with some of the most successful franchises comprising three films. Whether it be one epic story broken up into three chapters, like in The Lord of the Rings; or three stand-alone films revolving around the same group of characters, like the Sam Raimi Spiderman movies, isn’t it strange that the second entry is always the best? This is a ridiculously bold claim – and it’s meant to be – however I genuinely believe it holds true 99% of the time: without beating a dead horse, Godfather 2 is renowned for being one of the best sequels of all time; other such classics include Shrek 2 and Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, both being impeccable pieces of cinema that adhere to the second-is-best rule.
This tendency towards the second film’s superiority in trilogies requires some serious exploration. For me as a viewer, the second always has an advantage over the first. It doesn’t need to spend time introducing the characters, their relationships between one another, or even the overarching plot of the film in instances where the trilogy is one epic story. The audience is already aware of these features. The lack of a need for introduction, or conversely the familiarity the audience has with the premise of the previous film, allows the sequel to capitalise on this and develop upon these ideas.
The first example that always springs to mind is Mad Max 2 from 1981. After the events of the first film, we are introduced to a completely new Max to the Max we knew from the first film. Moving past the role of police officer in the first film, Max is now a lone wanderer, with only his trustee Blue Heeler dog (creatively named Dog by Max) for support, unable to deal with his trauma and forced to survive in this apocalyptic wasteland. The change between Mad Max 1 and Mad Max 2 is stark, and it works incredibly well. Add in Mad Max 3: Beyond Thunderdome, however, and the franchise begins to flop. Apart from the only redeeming thing which is the wonderful Tina Turner, Mad Max 3 feels like the unbranded version of Mad Max 2. The atmosphere is the same, but the execution is just not there. A lot of the time, it feels to me as though the director has become deflated by the third film, and as a result tries to either rehash the previous films, or be too ambitious and fails.
I didn’t expect to mention Sam Raimi twice in such a short piece, but here we are. The third Evil Dead film, Army of Darkness – though I don’t hate this film as nostalgia is a strong mistress - falls into the latter category. While the first two Evil Dead films are quite campy at places, there is no doubt that they are horror films, and good ones at that, with Evil Dead 2 being one of my favourite horror films of all time. Army of Darkness, on the other hand, is more of a parody of the first two films. Despite the fact that I enjoyed the film profoundly over a decade ago, would a third Evil Dead film, sticking to a purely horror genre, have worked? I’d argue not.
To quote Paul Simon, as I often do, “if you establish some kind of comedic pattern, by the time you do it twice, it reinforces it; by the third time you have to alter it to be fresh.” The same applies to films. Be it a premature climax of the overarching plot already reached in the second film, or an original idea adequately harvested, there are possible explanations why the third film can never – and I use that term figuratively, as there are always exceptions to the rule – rise to the same level as the second film.
