Babysitting 2 (2015)

Babysitting 2 arrives as the second entry in a French found-footage franchise, which is a sentence that tells you most of what you need to know. Franck, his girlfriend Sonya, an assortment of friends, and Sonya's grandmother decamp to Brazil, where a cave expedition goes sideways and the handheld cameras keep rolling. The film is a joke-delivery apparatus. It has no other ambition, and it does not pretend otherwise.

For the cultural auditor, the ledger is blank. The Brazilian setting supplies jungle, humidity, and a reason for the characters to be far from home, but it never becomes a stage for historical reckoning or racial commentary. Women appear in the cast and are given gags, not arguments. Bodies exist in the frame without a thesis attached to them. Nobody is diagnosed, nobody is neurodivergent, nobody is on a journey of self-acceptance regarding their physical form. The cave is a punchline delivery system, not a metaphor for a warming planet. Money is spent on the trip and nobody questions the arrangement.

Perhaps the most striking absence is the sermon. The film does not want to teach. It wants you to watch a man fall into water and to find this funny. In a marketplace where even a beach comedy can be conscripted into a moral cause, this sort of abstention reads as almost quaint. There is no lecture, no closing speech, no character turning to the camera to explain what we should have learned. The sequel tag is earned honestly: more of the same, delivered with the same indifference to significance. A clean slate, and a mild relief.