Stephen King’s IT: Chapter Two - Review Thread

Bev train?

That movie left me with so many unanswered questions, like why the fuck does a horror movie have to be three hours long?

Plodding, repetitive, and totally unimaginative. Part of the blame is certainly King's writing, which is always problematic despite his best intentions and ambitions, but the movie also has massive pacing issues and an ending that's total shit. Doubles down on the weaknesses of the first film.

Full review tomorrow, perhaps, but this is a 5/10 thanks only to Bill Hader and James Ransone.

Thanks for the reviews, y'all. I didn't enjoy the first one much, so I'll wait to see this for free.

Two years ago, It was a monumental hit that broke box office records, ushered in a wave of greenlit Stephen King properties, and was definitely a cultural phenomenon in its own right becoming wildly popular, quotable, and parodied. None of this should have come as a surprise to anyone, as the property has always been among King's most popular, if not his most, and there's always been a sort of odd affinity amongst people for the 1990 miniseries starring Tim Curry despite it not being any good outside of his wonderful performance as Pennywise. It was a massive hit critically and commercially, and while I certainly had a lot of issues with it found to mostly be in agreement that it was a fun film and a worthy adaptation of King's work, bolstered by the strong work of its young cast and of course the scene stealing abilities of Bill Skarsgard as Pennywise. But it only told the first part of the lengthy novel, so inevitably we would be graced with the second part which is sort of universally agreed upon to be pretty inferior to its predecessor, both with the novel and the miniseries. Well unfortunately this also holds true for the film version, which doubles down on the first film's weaknesses while squandering the few casting strengths it can flex. Whereas the first film felt fresh and the mystique of Pennywise against a group of kids was somewhat suspenseful, It: Chapter Two introduces absurd mythos, a frustratingly repetitive storytelling structure, and an even more frustrating lack of signature scenes with Pennywise none of which culminates into anything frightening or compelling and is only mildly entertaining. Yes, it's a worthy enough companion piece to the first film, bringing back the young cast and interweaving them with the present adults, but a film that doesn't expand on anything well and certainly can't stand on its own feet as a singular film.

Twenty-seven years after the events of the first film in 1989, the young heroes of Derry, Maine that thwarted Pennywise are now spread out across the country living distant lives and appear to bear no recollection of the events that dramatically shaped all of their lives. The film opens on an odd hate crime where a man is thrown over a bridge and into the water below, where he succumbs to the reappeared Pennywise. It's not an entirely well done scene that poorly reintroduces the presence of Pennywise, but shortly after this event some children in Derry go missing, prompting the one member of the Losers still living in Derry, Mike (Isaiah Mustafa), to connect the dots and contacts each of the Losers to reunite as promised to defeat Pennywise. We're then reintroduced to the characters of the first film, now as adults, who all show reluctance to come back but eventually all do (save for one). Bill (James McAvoy) is a Hollywood screenwriter who is a sort of self-referential character to Stephen King himself in that he writes compelling premises and material but finishes it all off with terrible endings. Beverly (Jessica Chastain) doesn't get a lot of material or background surprisingly, aside that she's in a bad relationship with an abusive husband. Despite perhaps being the most interesting character in the first film, Chastain is utterly wasted in this role here, being little more than the one girl in the group of guys and nothing more. Richie (Bill Hader) is a successful comedian and carries the film throughout with his sharp humor and comical pessimism. James Ransone as Eddie also brings much needed levity and humor to the film, and one shudders to think of this tepid, lengthy affair without Hader and Ransone breathing life into the story as all of the other members of the cast are wasted as stock characters that really aren't much different from one another in either their execution or personal demons surfaced by Pennywise.

The best moments of the film are certainly when all of them are together, including a very well done restaurant scene where the gang drinks and revel in happy nostalgia, but surprisingly these moments are sort of far and few between as instead the film attempts over its lengthy running time to separate them out so we can be subjected to sequence after sequence of them squaring off solo against Pennywise. While this should be where the film builds momentum in both suspense and dramatic weight by exploring each character's inner depths, it sadly becomes a plodding example of repetition where each character revisits retreaded material from the first film only to narrowly escape Pennywise...every, single, time. It's the equivalent of taking the most uninspired dream sequences from the Nightmare on Elm Street sequels and applying them here, only where no one dies. This was a big issue I had with the first film in that it largely failed to generate any real suspense where Pennywise never really seems to exert his full powers and the kids just sort of run away over and over, and this problem is deeply worsened here. I understand this is the novel, and these films are attempting to be as faithful as they can be to the source material to a definite fault, but that's not an excuse for the lack of genuine thrills in this movie. It's a movie that is unnecessarily long, throwing the same game at you over and over while expanding on absolutely nothing. There's a good chemistry to the cast despite the material not benefitting the most talented of the group here in Chastain and McAvoy, but when these characters are split apart is where the film also falls apart, dragging its feet for nearly three hours and boring its audience with it.

All of this crescendos into one of the most lackluster conclusions to a horror film one is apt to view. Yes, I understand this is the end of the novel, but to call it anything but a letdown will result in you being accused of drinking the Stephen King kool-aid. King is undoubtedly a talented, gifted writer who has wonderful ambition and ideas that have led to his massive success, but at the same time there's a lot to his work that feels poorly constructed or not thought out at all, and It is certainly a casualty of this. It: Chapter Two reveals the mythos of Pennywise and how he came to Earth and the past attempts to thwart him. All of this comes off as immensely silly and even more so out of place, attempting to establish him as a sort of entity that is massively powerful and has the ability to essentially destroy mankind. It's way too broad for a movie that operates on a smaller scale and just doesn't fit here at all. The exposition comes off hokey and ridiculous, even for a movie about a shape shifting evil clown. It raises a lot more perplexing rebuttals to the events of the film than it does answers, and makes his inability to kill these damn people even more infuriatingly preposterous. It's all pretty sloppy, and then leads to the most hamfisted copout of the summer when It's not satisfying in the slightest and even worse doesn't feel earned to fit with the themes the film is trying to present through its cast about overcoming fear and embracing who you are. To look back on watching these two films for around five hours for it all to culminate into that climax is entirely unsatisfying and uninspired. Nothing feels really earned in the film, just presented, and it's a resounding disappointment all around when you reflect on what could have been. The movie commits a lot of sins, worst of all that Skarsgard has a minuscule amount of screen time and perhaps only one or two signature scenes at best. Pennywise is one of those characters that's remembered fondly, but when you actually sift through the material realize he's a great concept with middling execution. And that's essentially what these two films are as well. Or maybe this is the best version of this story that can be adapted to film without drastically altering the faults of the novel itself. Well, it was a fun enough diversion while it lasted, but audiences deserved more.

5/10

It: Chapter 2(9/5/2019)

Warning: Review Contains Light Spoilers

I try not to get too wrapped up with box office numbers, but sometimes when the right movie becomes a hit it can feel really good. The success of the movie It in 2017 was one of those cases. While not exactly what you’d call high art it was in many the kind of product that you hope for from large studio filmmaking: a solidly made adaptation of a respectable property which didn’t compromise more than it had to. Seeing that R-rated horror adaptation make $123 million dollars in its opening weekend and later end up among the top ten highest grossing of that year right between two MCU movies was really satisfying. This success had a lot to do with timing; Stephen King has always been relevant but the popularity of “Stranger Things” had really primed the audience for his brand of horror storytelling and the fact that this was focusing on the suburban childhood aspects of the book and that its milieu was moved from the 50s to the 80s really strengthened that connection. That’s not to say the movie entirely has the TV show to thank for the money it made but both properties were certainly tapping in to the same nostalgia vein that people really wanted tapped in 2017. Now, as happy as I was by the film’s success I wouldn’t go so far as to say it was one of my favorite films that year. In fact in my original review of the film I felt a little hesitant to pass judgement at all simply because I knew this second half was coming and wanted to see if some of the elements I thought were lumpy would pay off and to know for sure if it was going to stick the landing.

Set twenty seven years after the events of the first movie, It: Chapter 2 opens with an attack by Pennywise (Bill Skarsgård) which Mike Hanlon (Isaiah Mustafa) gets word of and realizes that this evil entity has returned on schedule. As Mike is the only member of “The Loser’s Club” who has remained in Derry all these years he takes it upon himself to call his old friends and reunite them in order to kill the monster once and for all. The “club” members lives have gone in different directions: Bill Denbrough (James McAvoy) is a horror novelist, Beverly Marsh (Jessica Chastain) is in an abusive marriage, Richie Tozier (Bill Hader) is a standup comedian, Ben Hanscom (Jay Ryan) has lost a lot of weight and is a wealthy architect, and Eddie Kaspbrak (James Ransone) has a desk job. They all reunite out of a sort of obligation but when they arrive many of them have forgotten about their fight with Pennywise as a function of how that entity’s magic works. Once they arrive and their memory is jogged many of them are reluctant to stay, especially after some scary encounters, but when they learn about the suicide of Stanley Uris (Andy Bean) who the one member who didn’t show up, they become resolved to finish the fight.

The big conversation leading up to the release of this film largely had to do with its running time. The movie is about 2 hours and 50 minutes long, which is not something I inherently have any problems with because to me that isn’t very unusual; it’s about ten minutes longer than Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, which I loved, and ten minutes shorter than Avengers: Endgame, which the masses flocked to. Given that the movie was half of an adaptation of a thousand page book it seemed largely reasonable and I was looking forward to seeing the film and telling all the haters that they were being silly for freaking out about that. Then I saw the movie and… yeah, it’s too long. Well, it’s not so much that it’s literally too long, I wouldn’t exactly say I lost interest in it over time or anything, but it has a bizarre structure and becomes repetitive in ways that eventually undermine it.

Take the opening scene, which is a disturbing depiction of a hate crime perpetuated against a gay couple which ends with one of them being thrown off a bridge and then murdered by Pennywise. It’s a strongly rendered scene, but what is it doing in this movie? We never see the attack’s survivor again or the human attackers and while it does serve to announce Pennywise’s return that could have been achieved just as easily by moving a later attack against a kid at a baseball game (which is shorter, fits Pennywise’s MO better, and has less baggage) to the beginning. Then there’s the character of Henry Bowers; in my review of the first film I said “there are elements of it like the Henry Bowers sub-plot which I would criticize as being superfluous and in need of cutting if not for the fact that I suspect it will come up again in the sequel,” and while he does indeed come back his presence in the sequel ends up being as much of a time waste as he was in the first. His three or so scenes are well made, I can see why a director would be attached to them and want to leave them in, but he ultimately has no effect at all on the plot beyond being one more obstacle and has only the slightest effect on theme, so his presence here only lengthens the movie and does very little to justify is presence in the last movie either.

Superfluous as those scenes were, they can be set aside as merely misjudged extravagances on the part of director Andy Muschietti, who seems to be going into this sequel with a lot more confidence and money than he did before after the massive success of the first film. The bigger structural problem with the film is that it’s basically a movie with six protagonists and feels obligated to give each of them equal screen time. For instance the film has to begin by Mike making six different phone calls to each of his former friends one after another, forcing the movie to stop and give us six different vignettes about where these people are in their lives. That might be a necessary expository tool (aside from the weird domestic violence vignette in Beverly’s introduction which is kind of left dangling), but what’s less forgivable is how the film then spends a lot of its first half sending each of the six characters out to find “artifacts from their past.” In practice that means six episodic segments in a row of a character going somewhere in the town, having a flashback to some moment of their past too inconsequential to have been in the first movie, and then having Pennywise fuck with them in some ineffective way.

Pennywise’s habit of appearing before our main characters to creep them out rather than actually kill them was actually a problem I had with the first movie. In my review of that movie I said “every other time we see him he seems to have taken the form of the clown specifically for the purposes of scaring the crap out of the kids he’s elected to target for unknown reasons and he spends a whole lot of time playing largely ineffective mind games with them” but I sort of let it go because you could sort of explain it away as Pennywise underestimating The Losers Club, but it’s harder to forgive here as we see six episodes in a row of him jumping out and going “boo” at our heroes and them getting away from it unscathed. And beyond simply making the first chunk of this movie kind of tedious it also kind of hurts the rest of the film because it makes Pennywise a bit of a paper tiger who can’t actually hurt anyone, which is kind of a suspense killer. At its heart I think the problem here is that in the original novel this half of the story with the characters as adults were meant to act as something of a framing story to the scenes with the kids rather than a standalone narrative unto itself. That makes the film kind of awkward because instead of flashing back to the actual important parts of their childhood (which were all in the first movie) they just flash back to some random crap that belongs on the cutting room floor.

Despite these structural problems there is a lot here to like. For one thing the casting here is really strong. These certainly won’t go down as the best performances of James McAvoy or Jessica Chastain, not even close, but they are definitely believable as older versions of those characters from the first film and the same can be said of most of the less famous actors in the film. Then there’s Bill Hader, who like his fellow cast mates makes perfect sense as an older version of that character and he’s been widely considered to be a standout element of the film because of the comic relief he provides. This praise is largely deserved, he is quite funny in the film and commands the screen when he’s in it, but his role in the film is a bit of a double edged sword. There is definitely a place for levity even in the most hardcore of horror cinema but here Hader is doing so much comedy that it does sort of hurt the tension a little, or at least it contributes to the other problems the film has with Pennywise’s general ineffectiveness. Really the whole movie has a much different tone from the first movie in no small part because of this. In fact it almost feels more like a summer blockbuster than a true horror film, especially considering that a lot of the film’s scares involve CGI imagery, some of which is more effective than others.

What I’d really like, is to see a supercut of the first and second film put together into an epic five hour movie that cuts between the two timelines. Maybe in that context the characters artifact hunts would seem less like repetitive time wasting and maybe that long runtime would make Bill Hader’s comedy seem less omnipresent and more like a true relief from the rest of the horror. As an individual movie though It: Chapter 2 is kind of a weird movie that’s hard to really call “good” or “bad.” I can rattle off a whole checklist of ways that it’s misshapen and indulgent but it would be hard to really say I disliked it or that I didn’t appreciate having seen it. The things that do work in it work quite well and frankly I’d rather a movie fail through over-reach than through mundanity. So if you liked the first movie, by all means see the second but go in with the expectation that it’s meant to give a fairly different experience than you got from the first one and that it’s going to be a bit of a bumpy ride at times.

*** out of Five

Disappointing.