'P2' (R)(out of four)

For any of you who ever felt nervous walking into a deserted, underground parking lot, there's a new movie that aims to do for those structures what "Jaws" did for the beach. And for a while , at least, it succeeds.

In "P2,"Angela (Rachael Nichols from "Alias") is a hardworking executive who is slaving away late on Christmas Eve in her high-rise office. She's trying to get away to visit family, but is contending with a demanding boss and an apologetic co-worker who earlier made a drunken move on her in the building's elevator.

When she finally does descend with her load of Christmas presents into one of the most stark, claustrophobic and dimly lit parking structures ever filmed, she discovers her car won't start.

Angela gets assistance from Thomas (Wes Bentley - "American Beauty"), a helpful security guard who can't start the car either. But the creepy meter begins to chatter big time when he invites her to join him for dinner in the building's security office.

No idiot, Angela decides to call a cab, but quickly finds all the doors to the street are mysteriously locked, preventing her from leaving the virtually deserted building. It doesn't take long before she realizes that Thomas is behind her misfortune, and that he's doing his single-handed best to keep the respect level of security guards in the low percentiles.

The first 45 minutes of "P2" are the most effective. As directed by former music video and commercial filmmaker Franck Khalfoun, the tension results more from the psychological than anything too overt. At the halfway point of the film, however, things get graphically bloodier.

The script for "P2" was written by Alexandre Aja (scribe of the French horror film "High Tension") and Gregory Levasseur, who co-wrote the remake of "The Hills Have Eyes," who got the idea after reading an article about a Paris woman who was terrorized in a parking lot.

Where "P2" really falters is with its characters. Although the broad outlines are drawn for both the guard and the woman, we really don't get a sense of who they are -- especially Angela.

The film brought back memories of "Dead Calm"-- one of Nicole Kidman's first movies in which she played a woman held captive and forced to use her wits to escape. Here, the heroine seems mostly to whimper and run around in a low-cut outfit, chased by your average, run-of-the-mill movie psycho.

The end result: A movie that starts with promise but relies on the normal bag of tricks to get across the finish line -- or at least to P1.