It Chapter Two

photo courtesy of variety.com

SPOILER-FREE REVIEW

     Set 27 years after the events of the first film, It Chapter Two begins with the grown-up members of the Losers Club (now played by James McAvoy, Jessica Chastain, Bill Hader, Isaiah Mustafa, Jay Ryan, James Ransone, and Andy Bean), leading separate lives. But when the supernatural, fear-manipulating monster Pennywise (Bill Skarsgård) returns to terrorize Derry once more, it falls to the Losers to find the will to defeat It… if It can be defeated.

     2017’s It was sensational—part E.T/The Goonies/the Sandlot/Stand By Me/Stranger Things and part gory, supernatural horror film. The young actors of the Losers Club had great chemistry, and Skarsgård’s Pennywise complemented their dynamic with a ton of clever scares. The idea was to leave the other part of King’s novel, the part covering the grown-up Losers’ final battle with Pennywise, for the sequel.

photo courtesy of deadline.com

     Well that sequel has arrived, and I reluctantly report that it’s something of a disappointment. Chapter Two might have enough going for it to merit one watch, and fans of the first film will certainly be interested to see how the characters fare. But with a wandering storyline, uneven scares, and not much in the way of depth, It is far from essential.

     Let’s start with the script. It Chapter Two feels like an unwieldy first draft, the one where the writer includes every odd idea and doesn’t know what to cut. At almost three hours, the movie is way too long for the amount of narrative material in play. The pacing is bad, the second act is repetitive, and Muschietti (the director) spends valuable screen-time on confusing, irrelevant tangents.

photo courtesy of empireonline.com

     Then we have Chapter Two’s scares, which ought to be the bread and butter of a blockbuster horror film. Here it’s all hit or miss. Some spooky scenes are genuinely tense—one builds suspense quite skillfully—but too many are predictable or unimaginative. Some get ruined by silly CGI effects, a problem that also plagued the first movie, though to a lesser extent.

     The grown-up Losers cast, meanwhile, is easily the best thing about Chapter Two. They have a likeable dynamic and share some funny scenes. Bill Hader, fresh off Emmy nominations for his HBO show Barry, gives a standout performance that more or less makes the entire movie worthwhile.

photo courtesy of nypost.com

     But the sequel really feels the absence of the young cast (though they do appear in a number of flashbacks). Without them at the center, there’s no second ingredient to bounce off the horror beats and keep things interesting—no E.T, no Goonies, no Stranger Things. Chapter Two could have found something new to fill the void, but it doesn’t seem to have any ideas. And without the kids, Chapter Two has to reach harder for the meaningful subtext (how the people of Derry, and in particular adults, are guilty of and complicit with violence themselves) that added depth to the first film.

     Finally, I think it’s worth pointing out that as it stands, It Chapter Two doesn’t have much reason to exist. It exists because there’s another section of King’s novel that needing covering, but if it weren’t for that fact—if these two movies existed in a vacuum—I think most people would view this one as a callous cash grab. Maybe two things developed by Chapter Two end up adding something substantial to the first film, and only one gets enough screen-time to go anywhere. Apart from that, Chapter Two doesn’t do much, thematically or experientially, that the first film didn’t already cover.

It Chapter Two is rated R for disturbing violent content and bloody images throughout, pervasive language, and some crude sexual material.

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