MOVIE NEWS – Four years after 2022’s surprise success Fall, its sequel Fall 2: Deadpoint has arrived with another attempt to strand its protagonists at terrifying heights and test audiences’ nerves. Critics have been considerably less enthusiastic this time around, with the new adventure thriller currently sitting at just 58% on Rotten Tomatoes.
The summer movie season traditionally brings the year’s biggest blockbusters, and 2026 was certainly no exception. One of the biggest releases was Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, which attracted enormous attention partly because it became the first feature film shot entirely with IMAX cameras, allowing audiences to immerse themselves more deeply than ever in the epic adventure. Just a few weeks later came Spider-Man: Brand New Day, the MCU Spider-Man franchise’s first direct sequel since 2021’s record-breaking Spider-Man: No Way Home. Brand New Day even surpassed its predecessor in several respects, further cementing 2026 as an exceptionally strong year for theaters.
While several of the year’s biggest releases are still performing strongly at the box office, we are entering that unusual transitional period when the summer blockbusters have already landed but the major awards-season contenders have yet to arrive. This often gives more modestly scaled movies an opportunity to step into the spotlight, occasionally resulting in unexpected success stories. That is precisely what happened with 2022’s Fall, which followed two adventurers stranded at the top of an abandoned television tower. The movie did not receive the same overwhelming acclaim as that year’s biggest releases, but it later became a streaming hit, with audiences clearly responding to the nerve-racking prospect of being trapped hundreds of feet above the ground.
Fall proved successful enough to earn a sequel, Fall 2: Deadpoint, which arrives in theaters this weekend. The basic concept remains familiar, once again placing characters in an impossibly dangerous position at extreme height, although the story largely works as a standalone installment. Critics have now weighed in, and its current 58% Rotten Tomatoes score confirms that the sequel has produced a sharply divided response.
The original Fall did not completely blow critics away either, but the general consensus was that it accomplished what it set out to do, reflected in its 80% positive score on Rotten Tomatoes. The sequel clearly has not captured the same magic. Despite relatively little narrative tissue connecting the two films, Fall 2: Deadpoint follows Jax Hunter (Harriet Slater), sister of the first film’s Shiloh Hunter (Virginia Gardner), as she heads into the mountains of Thailand with her friend Luce (Arsema Thomas), only for the pair to become trapped at a terrifying height. Our own review reached a similar conclusion: the vertigo-inducing danger works far better than the screenplay and characters, resulting in a 5.8/10 score from us.
Variety’s Todd Gilchrist offered one of the more positive assessments. In his view, “Fall 2 still feels kinda special: if not hand-crafted, then at least mostly guided by the author of the original. Given the first film’s word-of-mouth success, it is difficult to know whether there is genuinely a devoted fandom for this altitude-obsessed franchise or whether it simply became a welcome time-filler during the waning days of the pandemic. Anyone looking for a similar-but-not-the-same experience, however, will probably be satisfied.”
Bill Bria of /Film was similarly positive. He argued that “Fall 2 proves itself by delivering a nail-biting thriller that does not feel like a simple retread, while remaining connected enough to the first film to feel like a continuing story rather than a lazy namesake. Its most remarkable quality is the way it demonstrates that both the concept and its characters still have further to climb, something I certainly would not have guessed from the first movie.”
The negative reactions were considerably harsher. The AV Club’s Simon Abrams wrote that “Fall 2: Deadpoint often feels like a speedrun through a tense and absorbing scenario that keeps getting interrupted by tedious and unconvincing scenes. By the increasingly wild finale, you will wish the filmmakers had either invested more effort in developing their characters or simply treated them more honestly as vehicles for circumstantial danger. As it stands, this thankless sequel’s highs simply are not high enough.”
Considering that the original movie found its biggest success through streaming rather than at the box office, it may take Fall 2: Deadpoint reaching a streaming platform before it develops a more substantial following of its own. Its sharply divided critical reception therefore does not necessarily mean the sequel will be regarded as a failure in the longer term.
Source: MovieWeb
