The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 2 (2012)
Starring: Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, Taylor Lautner, Peter Facinelli, Ashley Greene, Nikki Reed, Joe Anderson, Lee Pace, Myanna Burring, Jackson Rathbone, Kellan Lutz, Elizabeth Reaser, Billy Burke
Directed by: Bill Condon
Rating: 
At last the end is near. Four years after K-Stew and R-Patz first pouted and glittered their way into our lives, the Twilight saga is finally bowing out. But will it leave with a wounded lupine whimper or an epic Lord of the Rings-style bang?
While the first three films still dallied with some notion of credibility, all grip on reality was lost in Breaking Dawn Part 1, in which Bella Swann (Kristen Stewart) finally gets her man, gets pregnant and gets to be a vampire. Bye-bye high school, panel trucks and clapboard housing; farewell bemused father, moustache bristling with confusion; welcome to the rarified stratum of the superrich, perfect, shiny Cullens.
However, as Bella and Edward's daughter Renesmee (Mackenzie Foy) grows at an alarming rate (yes, the only realistic thing about this film is that young parents tend to give their children stupid names – then leave them to the rest of the family to babysit) she poses a threat to the shadowy Volturi, humourless undead overlords who ponce around in the dungeons of Venice wearing long velvet capes and signet rings, like The Lost Boys never happened.
And so the battle lines are drawn between this ancient patriarchal vampire aristocracy and a misfit band of outlaw bloodsuckers, albeit mostly neatly sorted into ersatz heterosexual family units. Just as it's all starting to get a bit X-Men meets The Quest (where are the kilted Scottish vampires tossing their cabers?) the vista brightens as enter the lovely Lee Pace and Joe Anderson as renegade vamps who cut their teeth in the 18th century and their fashion sense in the '80s. But sadly they're woefully under-used, their stubbly heroin chic clearly no match for the clean-cut Cullens and their smug Colgate smiles in the battle that really counts in Breaking Dawn: the scrabble for screen-time.
The wolves are obviously still hanging around (well, somebody has to have normal coloured eyes), Jacob rather blowing his claim to be Best Uncle Ever by weirdly 'imprinting' on the baby – although, hey, she'll reach puberty in seven years so that's okay…
And so the two tribes go to war on a vast, picturesque snowy plain, and it gets a little bit exciting as fur and heads begin to fly… and then it's the biggest cop-out since Patrick Duffy walked out of the bathroom thinking, 'That was an awfully long shower'.
And in the end, what does it matter anyway? Because after all, it's hard to invest a battle with epic status when it has absolutely no repercussions in the real world. Like Hollywood A-listers, the vampires exist in an elite, impenetrable bubble, divorced from the humdrum lives of everyday mortals (the fact that they eat them is pretty much brushed under the carpet), and, conversely, whether they rip each to shreds or shake hands and go home appears to make no difference at all to the human population. Oh Harry Potter, oh Being Human, you were so much better.
Stand-off over, it's a roll-call of everyone who was in the films ever, and time to realise that, nope, most of them are still not famous. And then, well, it is actually finally over.
Goodbye, Twilight. You were possibly the silliest saga ever to smash box office records. You set back the cause of feminism about 150 years. Your scripts were stilted, your special effects laughably crummy, your soundtrack an exercise in mawkish EMO sentiment, and you made a staring contest between two sloths look like an action-packed thriller. And yet, like your heroine, you had a certain awkward, ridiculous, unrealistic charm. You were rubbish, but a tiny part of me sort of loved you a bit anyway. And that's the most incredible thing of all.
