I wasn’t very impressed with The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part One when it first came out last year so going into Part Two, I had very low expectations and expected to have to hold back laughter at some of the cheesy dialogue that was being spouted.

And I did indeed have to stiffle some laughs but there was one point where I couldn’t and it came gushing out. It is the scene fairly early on in the film and it has Jacob (Taylor Lautner) doing a slow striptease in front of Bella’s (Kristen Stewart) dad, Charlie (Billy Burke) that he seemed hilariously uncomfortable. I couldn’t stop laughing because it was so ridiculous. Jacob of course was showing Charlie that he is a werewolf. Jacob wanted to show Charlie this to reassure him that Bella is okay and there is a reason why she has changed.

But I am getting ahead of myself. Part Two pretty much picks up where Part One left off and that is Bella awakening to her new vampire reality and Edward (Robert Pattinson) teaching her the ropes. She basically gets used to this new lifestyle, meets her daughter, Renesmee (Mackenzie Foy) that has aged considerably since she last saw her two days ago and she also learns that Jacob has imprinted on Renesmee and goes and kicks his butt as any concerned parent would do when someone has intentions towards their child.

And Bella and Edward, because they are the same now, can realize the full potential of their love.

The conflict of this movie arises when Irinia (Maggie Grace), a vampire cousin of the Cullens, sees Renesmee and thinks she is an immortal child, which is against Volturi law. So the Volturi uses this as leverage to battle the Cullens.

Alice sees this and asks the Cullens to gather witnesses to prove that Renesmee is half-human, half-vampire. One of these witnesses that I want to mention is one called Garrett and played by Lee Pace. I love Lee Pace. He played Ned the Pie Maker in one of my favourite TV shows in the last 5 years called Pushing Diasies. 

The movie like the book by Stephenie Meyer is building up to this big show down with the Volutri. But this is where the movie and book veer off and I am going to spoil this much publicized twist to the story. So if you haven’t seen Part Two yet and don’t want to know what this twist is, then please stop.

In the book, we are lead to believe that there is going to be this big battle between the Volturi, the Cullens and their witnesses and the werewolves but there wasn’t. There was a tiny moment with Bella using her shield power but that was it.

In the movie, screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg actually added this battle. And the twist was it all started because Aro held Alice (Ashley Greene) captive and Carlisle (Peter Facinelli) upset, goes headlong to fight Aro who promptly rips Carlisle’s head off (first shock) then burns his body (second shock). As we continue this battle between the two vampire parties and the werewolves we get more casualties in the form Jasper (Jackson Rathbone), Leah (Julia Jones) who sacrificed herself to save Esme (Elizabeth Reaser) and Seth (Boo Boo Stewart) who sacrificed himself to protect Bella. There are casualties on both sides and when we see Aro’s death at the hands of Edward and Bella, I really should have known that the whole battle was a vision of Alice of the future that will be if Aro didn’t change his mind about what to do with Renesmee.

I understand why Rosenberg needed to add this part in because the movie needed to be padded and have an action scene. The build up to this battle needed a payoff that just didn’t occur in the book. If the movie was really true to the book then it would have made for a faithful but boring ending.

Then the movie veers back on course and follows the movie. We meet someone from a tribe in Brazil (played by Revolution’s JD Pardo) who tells the Volturi that Renesmee means no harm and she will grow up but stop aging when she appears to be 17.

So we get a happy ending and Alice sees a grown up Renesmee with Jacob happy and Edward and Bella happy and the movie ends back at their meadow.

Some of the acting here was atrocious starting with Stewart. She was awful, especially at the beginning, when she was pissed that Jacob had imprinted on her daughter. Another bad one was Noel Fisher as one of the Romanian vampires. His Romanian accent was so laughable that I really wanted to laugh out loud but I didn’t. Michael Sheen was deliberately over the top in his performance as Aro, the head of the Volutri and Maggie Grace at least looked less constipated here than she was in Part One. But at least Billy Burke was pretty good as Charlie who pleads ignorance to all the supernatural stuff going around him including how one moment he meets Renesmee as a baby to her being a toddler.

And this is the laughable bit here where they tried to CGI Mackenzie Foy’s face and de-age onto a baby’s and toddler’s body. It totally looked fake and distracting.

I still think it was a mistake to split this movie into two parts but at least Part Two was less cheesy than Part One. But of all 5 Twilight movies, I would put this as second worse.

However, I did think it was a nice touch to credit everyone that was in all the Twilight movies even if they weren’t in Part Two.

It is too bad that I was once very passionately in love with Twilight and that I am leaving this Saga on a somewhat bittersweet note.