[4.2/10] As scores of painful voiceovers will let you know in no uncertain terms (let alone subtle ones), *IT Chapter Two* is a movie centered around the idea that you cannot run away from trauma. You have to confront it, process it, and accept it in order to move past it, even if it means facing down things you would rather just run away from.
My only hope is that this moral exclusively applies to emotional trauma and not the lingering distaste for a bad movie, because I never want to have to watch *IT Chapter Two* again.
Rarely has a sequel fallen so far from the heights of its predecessor in such a comically bad way. The 2017 *IT* adaptation had its imperfections, but it was a scary, relatable, and ultimately heartening tale of overcoming fear and abuse wrapped up in a gripping horror passage. This film, by contrast, is a tonally mishmashed, overly long car crash of a feature, rife with baffling missteps at almost every turn that make you wonder if the filmmakers even saw the first movie.
That starts with the shift in tone. The previous “chapter” of *IT* had its funny moments, particularly when the horror was compartmentalized in favor of some preteen hangouts, but you’d never call it a comedy.. *IT Chapter Two*, on the other hand, would be best termed an attempt at a horror comedy. It’s chock full of explicit gag material and even winking bits that feel more of a piece with Whedonalia like *Cabin in the Woods* than the first movie.
I can understand the impulse. When you have a comic pro like Bill Hader, who is the one shining light (if you’ll pardon the expression) in this film, I get wanting to take advantage of him. But *It Chapter Two* never fully settles on that tone, instead going for a strange amalgamation of a tongue-in-cheek, horror-infused laugher with a deadly serious, mythos-heavy tear-jerker. The two halves of the film’s personality don’t fit together at all, and worse yet, the levity tends to be packed into more scare-heavy sequences, undermining their ability to frighten the audience or convince it to take the horror seriously.
But maybe that’s no great loss given the meh level of scary sequences we get in this film. Even if you weren’t into the kid friendship bits or overcoming fear themes of the first *IT* movie, it could boast a nonstop array of skin-crawling scares. Its sequel, on the other hand, can only offer a host of less-convincing CGI creations and concocts a heap of scenarios that either feel like pale rehashes of routines the last movie already did, or original but less availing new efforts that fail to impress. Really, only Stan’s severed head and its insectoid evolution shows the fearsome creativity of the first flick, so perhaps we didn’t lose much despite the addition of tonally odd gags throughout.
Many of those horror sequences come in the form of flashbacks, whether it’s Eddie seeing the leper go after his mom, Bill nearly being pulled into the storm drain, or Ben being chased through the halls of the school by Pennywise. These scenes are tedious and unnecessary, and not just because the scares are less potent. This film is riddled with retcons that hurt, rather than help it as a sequel.
One of the smartest choices the prior film made was to focus on the kids’ story rather than jumping back and forth between past and present like the book and T.V. miniseries did. It added a certain clarity and propulsiveness to that “chapter” of the tale. Here, on the other hand, the movie doesn’t just mess up its pacing and structure with those constant leaps across the years, but it retroactively weakens the last film by packing in a bunch of useless scenes in the timeline that jumble the characters’ arcs from when they were kids.
The best thing you can say about *It Chapter Two* is that it picks up some of those stories and themes from when these characters were children and tries to advance them in interesting ways. The worst you can say is that it botches the exchange between past and present almost every time.
Bill’s arc in the first movie was accepting his little brother’s death and not trying to revive him. *Chapter Two* takes that a step further, with Bill grappling with his guilt over not being there for his little brother when he was abducted and beating himself up for faking sick to avoid playing with his younger sibling. There’s a strong concept there, but the movie chooses to dramatize it by Bill...having trouble writing good (read: happy) endings as a novelist and screenwriter? It’s a pretty meager realization of that theme.
Likewise, Beverly has one of the clearest instances of the movie’s “Ignoring past trauma just leads to repeating it” ethos as her abusive father has been replaced with an abusive husband. But the film’s solution to that is just her realizing that Ben always loved her and the two getting together after being reacquainted for maybe a few days? Odder still, the film hinges Ben’s arc on his fear that he’ll forever be unwanted and die alone, which was vaguely in the background of his phobias and journey of the first one, but never really at the forefront, forcing awkward retcons to try to make that the issue in his young life after the fact.
The same is true, only worse, for Richie. *Chapter Two* suggests that Richie’s raunchy talk was just a means of sublimating his attraction to Eddie, and centers his story on Pennywise trying to exploit his fears of being found out. That is, again, a really strong concept, but one that has very little force given how many retcons and clunky flashbacks this film has to use considering there was basically no setup for that in the first one. Instead, it has to try to forge a deep romantic connection out of whole cloth in between wacky pomeranian jokes.
But hey, it could be worse. You could be Mike, who doesn’t even really get an arc despite being the instigator of this half of the story. (Charitably, you could say these events are Mike fully embracing the “You can take control and execute sheep or be one of them” message his grandfather gave him, but it’s undercooked here.) Similarly, Eddie’s journey here, to the extent he has one, is a rehash of the one he took in the first chapter, requiring an equally clumsy retcon to establish. And Stan dies for the thinnest of reasons, with an equal and opposite lionization that doesn’t track with the person we saw previously. Virtually none of the characters are well-served here, which hobbles the movie as much as the substandard scares.
Beyond those broad, overarching issues with the films, it also makes some smaller but still head scratch-worthy choices. One of the most frightening things about Pennywise previously is that he’s this unknown and almost unknowable force, whose history is hinted at through Ben’s research but who gains force as an antagonist by being something whose impetus and limitations aren’t really known. Here, for some reason, we get an origin story and mythos for him that’s not only superfluous, but which helps to neuter one of the decade’s most terrifying villains by stuffing him into the realm of the known and understood.
On top of that baffling decision, with Pennywise in play, why does this film need the last film’s bully breaking out a mental hospital and chasing around our heroes with the help of his zombie chauffeur? Why does it send the Losers Club on what amounts to a hunt for Pennywise’s horcruxes to fill time? Why did this already overextended disappointment need to last nearly three hours?
That may be the most excruciating thing about *It Chapter Two* -- by the time you get to the third act and the final confrontation with Pennywise, you start to feel like it’s just never going to wrap this thing up. There are *so many endings* to this movie. You have the ancient indigienous people’s ritual. You have the individual fear-facing. You have the *actual* defeat of Pennywise. You have the escape from the cave. You have the recreation of a bit from childhood. You have the friendly phone call among friends. You have the bog standard voice over montage from the fallen friend while we see scenes of everyone’s *individual* happy ending. You have the jump back to the crew as kids. It just keeps going and going, and it is *exhausting*.
Worst still, it’s a cliché festival. Everything the film does in that final forty-five minutes or so is saccharine and trite, lacking in any real insight or complexity. What finally kills Pennywise is just a combination of believing in yourself and turning the tables on the people who’d make you feel small. Every happy ending is predictable and every beat to get there, from hook-ups to scars disappearing to reflections of younger selves is cheesy and unsatisfying as hell. Extended finishes aren’t the worst thing in the world if a movie can earn the tension and emotion necessary to sustain them, but *Chapter Two* comes up woefully short.
Some of these problems stem from the source material, but that’s a weak excuse. This is an adaptation, free to make its own choices and hone the original tale to fit the story *these filmmakers* wanted to tell. Maybe that would cost them an overly cutesy Stephen King cameo (see also: the “Heeeeere’s Johnny” bit), but it would have resulted in a better movie. Streamlining the weaker elements, and taking more time to build on the first “chapter” rather than revise it on the fly, could have resulted in a worthy follow-up. Instead, we got this dud, with the only fear it can generate being the concern that you’ve wasted three hours of your life on a film that wasn’t remotely worth it.
There are, nevertheless, some good ideas and a noble goal at the heart of *IT Chapter Two*. Our collection of heroes leaving Derry to forget but having to return, remember, and confront childhood hardships works as a metaphor for trying to leave childhood trauma behind when the best course is to deal with it and hopefully transcend it. In its best moments, this film grazes that ideal and generates a few compelling scenes. But its worst moments far outnumber those scattered gems, and result in a movie that should be left in the sewers of Derry, with as much distance put between it and audiences, in the hopes that we can all just forget it, at least for a good twenty-seven years or so.
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