‘My Ex 2: Haunted Lover’ Review

Stars: Ratchawin Wongviriya, Atthama Chiwanitchapan, Thongpoom Siripipat, Marion Affolter, Pete Thongchua | Written by Adirek Wattaleela | Directed by Piyapan Choopetch

Those are some pretty exciting names right there. I wouldn’t even know where to begin pronouncing Chiwanitchapan or Thongpoom, but I’m having a lot of fun with them nonetheless. Such is the joy having met only one Thai person in my life so far. I lived with the guy for a year so you totally can’t call me racist for enjoying these subjectively silly names, all right?

Okay, good. Glad we got that cleared up. Why am I babbling on about Asian names, you yell? Well, that’s because the credits are pretty much the only enjoyable part of My Ex 2, a movie whose title could easily be mistake for a garbled text message or – if you squint really hard – some kind of maths formula. For a really bad movie. The theme I’m going for here is that you shouldn’t buy this film.

For posterity’s sake, the story – although I’m sure you’ve heard this one before – concerns a vacuous young actress being told by her vacuous (yet hateful) friends to dump her smug, vacuous, cheating boyfriend, but she’s just too “nice” (read: totally without backbone, dimensionality or anything resembling a personality) to flip him the bird. Cue his other girlfriend meeting a grisly end after jumping from a tall building (I’ll save you a lot of hard work: IT WASN’T SUICIDE) and haunting our heroine (loosest sense of the word possible; I’ve eaten more heroic cornflakes) and her annoying mates as they lounge in a bunch of exotic – and secluded, natch – locales for mostly no reason except I think there’s a film shoot at one point and oh yeah people start croaking and there’s a Shocking Revelation That No-One Could Have Seen Coming unless maybe you saw My Ex in which case they both probably have the same ending but I really hope nobody has the misfortune to see two of these blandfests in the first place anyhow.

The movie is a parade of shock tropes used and abused way past their effective use-by date and no number of serene establishing shots of tropical water hostels(?) can disguise the blandness of the whole affair. All that would be bad enough to make Tex Mex 2: Electric Boogaloo just another shitty, boring movie, but it goes one step further into actual ham-fisted interminable tripe as its third act reveals information that really should have been given to us very near the beginning and alters our sympathies (as if they were ever there to begin with) to such a significant degree that the whole sodding affair feels like a massive exercise in futility. No scares, no thrills, no characters of any description to be seen anywhere…but hey! A post-credit scene reveals what I can only pray isn’t a lead-in to the next sequel but a coda in which the main character’s OTHER ex realise he needs to stop dating expressionless weirdos and goes on to star in a nice romantic drama involving an ice cream shop or something. I’m not going to hold my breath or anything.

My Ex 2: Haunted Lover is released on DVD on June 3rd from MVM. God knows why.