Too much moping, too little Edward in 'New Moon'

Children of the night, arise. It’s the time of the “New Moon,” the second  movie, based on the second book, of “The Twilight Saga.”

Since the first movie has become a pop-culture phenomenon, we can expect packs of teen girls to turn out this weekend (complete with soprano screams) for Edward Cullen (the vampire with an icy stare, bouncy-boy hair and a gentleman’s bearing).

Here’s the scoop on the second movie: It offers more mush and less action. By mush, we mean icy stares that are meant to be passionate and lots of fingers that meet, caress and then are pulled apart. And there’s always Bella’s neck. It’s there. Vulnerable. But Edward is a nice vampire who doesn’t feed on humans, and besides, he’s so protective of her that he gives her up to save her. If he weren’t a vampire, any father would be glad for his daughter to bring this suitor home.

The most embarrassing scene in the new movie is one of the first, when the Cullen family goes berserk because Bella cuts her finger and there is the smell of blood. A particularly no-good Edward relative can’t resist the urge, so he attacks her, and there’s some furniture thrown about. Clearly it’s not safe for her to be around Edward’s family, but the incident isn’t enough to make the audience believe there is sufficient reason for a breakup.

This guy, though, is weird. He is so overly protective of Bella that he sneaks into her room and watches her sleep. Social critics might well question, too, a relationship that is built on fear. The scarier he is, the better she likes him.

As the song goes: When he goes away, that’s a rainy day.  “I’ll never see you again,” he tells her. It might have been a moving scene if we didn’t know there are two more books. The entire Cullen family moves away, leaving Bella to mope and go into isolation. She mopes a lot.            Kristen Stewart, a 19-year-old, not particularly impressive, actress who has found a huge meal ticket here, is better when she’s asked to play the slightly feisty, independent side of Bella. She did that in the first movie, which was much better because it had a kind of “Romeo and Juliet” sweetness of new love about it.

Here, Bella goes into mourning for her lost love – something that’s never much fun to watch. She decides to get reckless with motorcycle riding and other daring things – not a minute too soon.

She also is smitten, in a “friendly” kind of way, by Jacob, the Native American teen who has been a best friend for awhile but now has filled out nicely and has Olympian-style abs and pecs. There is a triangle developing here, and that should be good for business.

One can see, though, why the producers were reluctant to continue with 17-year-old Taylor Lautner in the expanded role of Jacob. (He had merely a walk-on role in the first film.) He has lots of teeth and muscles, but it’s immediately clear he has spent more time in the gym than in acting classes. It’s also inappropriately clear that he is much younger than the other two members of the triangle. (Stewart is 19 but seems older, and Robert Pattinson, who plays Edward, is 23.) Jacob is meant, we assume, to be the reliable friend who is an alternative choice to the dark, dangerous Edward, but there’s no suspense here. We strongly suspect that the fans, as well as Bella, will stick, eventually, with Edward. (Since the books have sold more than 85  million copies, there is little suspense about the plotting.)

Jacob has other problems. He is a werewolf in puberty, which means, among other things, that he strips his shirt off a lot.

Pattinson remains the glue that holds this shaky movie franchise together. There was some risk in “New Moon” in that he is barely in the book, after disappearing for Bella’s own good. Chris Weitz, who takes over direction from Catherine Hardwicke, came up with kind of dreamy fantasies that allow the new superstar enough screen time not to start a revolt in the theaters.

There was every right to expect that “New Moon” would have a much bigger budget after the first film’s success, but Jacob’s transformation from boy to werewolf looks particularly cheesy. (They did it much better 30 years ago in “An American Werewolf in London.”)

At two hours and 10 minutes, there isn’t enough done to hide the fact that this is just a transitional bridge to the last two books. For every scene Edward is missing, the energy wanes.

Love is less exciting the second time around.

Mal Vincent, (757) 446-2347, mal.vincent@pilotonline.com