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IT: CHAPTER TWO
Director: Andy Muschietti Cast: James McAvoy, Jessica Chastain, Bill Hader, Isaiah Mustafa, Jay Ryan, James Ransone, Bill Skarsgård, Jaeden Martell, Sophia Lillis, Jeremy Ray Taylor, Wyatt Oleff, Jack Dylan Grazer, Finn Wolfhard, Chosen Jacobs, Teach Grant, Andy Bean, Nicholas Hamilton, Xavier Dolan, Taylor Frey, Joan Gregson MPAA
Rating: Running Time: 2:49 Release Date: 9/6/19 |
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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 5, 2019 The idea is sound. It, the 2017 adaptation of the first part (chronologically speaking) of Stephen King's 1986 novel, was a trip through real and imagined childhood fears. It: Chapter Two, which mostly takes place 27 years after the events of the first film, is kind of about how the traumas of childhood become the pain, the regrets, and the insecurities of adulthood. It's only kind of about that, though. That's partly because the majority of the characters here can't remember their childhoods, but it's mostly because the creepy clown-demon-thing returns, too. It had to happen. The 2017 film ended with the kids of the Losers Club promising to return to their hometown of Derry, Maine, if Pennywise (Bill Skarsgård), the clownish demon or demonic clown, should ever come back and restart its child-murdering ways. Without the killer transforming clown, there's no story. What screenwriter Gary Dauberman and director Andy Muschietti didn't take into account, though, is that there's barely a story with the demon-clown-thing, either. There isn't a story we haven't already experienced, at least. Much of this sequel/conclusion is a reprise of the first film, only with some recognizable adult actors filling in for the strong child cast of its predecessor. The adults, who talk and behave almost exactly like their younger selves (part of the curse of the town, apparently), try to uncover the truth behind Pennywise and to find a way to defeat it. If that sounds familiar, that's likely because it's basically the plot of the first film. As for why the adults, who already figured most of this out as kids, have to go through the process of investigating Pennywise in between the sequences of being scared by it, well, that's because they have a form of amnesia that's very convenient for writers who'd rather repeat than expand. The kids return in flashbacks, also to be terrified in scenes that feel like ones excised in the editing room while making the first film. In King's book, of course, the past and the present played out at the same time, which meant we were learning along with the characters. Here, we know just about everything by the time we meet the grown-up versions of these characters, and the remaining details involve the specific mythology of the clown-demon. If there's one surefire way to undermine the scariness of a monster, it's to provide some balderdash about what it is, where it came from, and how the visions that come from ingesting a toxic root might hold the key to knowledge of destroying it. As for the human characters, we meet them all again through a series of brief introductions. Bill (James McAvoy) is now a successful author, adapting one of his novels into a movie. Beverly (Jessica Chastain) is married to an abusive man, in a hollow and dead-end callback to the relationship with her father. Ben (Jay Ryan) is wealthy and works with buildings or something of the sort. Richie (Bill Hader) is a famous standup comedian, and Eddie (James Ransone) works for an insurance company. They've all done surprisingly, improbably well for themselves after leaving Derry (even Stan, played by Andy Bean, is planning a vacation with his wife before exiting the picture), although Mike (Isaiah Mustafa) stuck around town. He's the one, after learning about the most recent killing, who calls his old friends back home and has to explain that they're there to kill Pennywise once and for all. Hence, we get it all again—what Pennywise is, how it operates, the process by which the Losers Club is going to kill it again. The expanded explanation involves a lot of fantastical stuff, which is kept vague enough that it only seems slightly ridiculous. In terms of the plot, it mainly means that the characters have to split up and take a trip down memory lane to find tokens of their past to sacrifice. For its part, the demon-clown hunts down some new victims (One in the prologue, and two kids later in a pair of chilling, if familiar, scenes) and also terrorizes the main characters in the present and in flashbacks to the past (This supposedly fills in some of the gaps in the first film's story, although the scenes mostly iterate what we already know—or just exist as an excuse to put the kids in peril again). The result is doubly repetitive, in terms of both storytelling and the tactics Muschietti implements for the scares. The characters remain static, save for a secret about Richie (revealed only through suggestion and Hader's performance, which makes an admirable turn near the end—after being the obvious-joke guy for the rest of the movie) and the love triangle between Beverly, Bill, and Ben. These are mostly thankless performances of almost non-existent characters. They're here to be frightened by Pennywise and an assortment of digital monsters, before taking on the clown-demon in an extended climax in an underground cavern (It's beneath the underground cavern of the first film's climax). It: Chapter Two is overly lengthy, blatantly familiar, and anticlimactic. This extended conclusion is just more of the same, with an unfortunate unwillingness to develop its characters, its ideas, or its methods. Copyright © 2019 by Mark Dujsik. All rights reserved. |
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(for
disturbing violent content and bloody images throughout, pervasive
language, and some crude sexual material)
