It was one of the best horror movies of 2017. It: Chapter Two, not so much. I wish I could say that was a bummer, but it’s more of an inevitability. There are several reasons for why It is such a difficult book to adapt: its crushing length, its nonlinear timeline, the fact that it’s a hodgepodge of Stephen King’s best and worst writing quirks, and the simple fact that the first half of the narrative is far more engaging than the second half. Andy Muschietti wrote himself into a corner when he decided to split the narrative in two, as the latter half is far and away the most bloated and least interesting.
It’s been twenty-seven years since the Losers Club defeated Pennywise (Bill Skarsgard), the demonic entity that’s been haunting the small town of Derry, Maine for millennia, and swore to return and finish the job should it ever return. Now they all received the phone call they hoped to never get. Since then, they’ve all went their separate ways and the memories of Pennywise have faded away. Bill (James McAvoy) has become a successful novelist, Beverly (Jessica Chastain) ends up in an abusive marriage with a mirror image of her father, Richie (Bill Hader) becomes a famous stand-up comedian, Eddie (James Ransone) is a still neurotic insurance agent, Ben (Jay Ryan) dropped the weight and became an architect, and Stan (Andy Bean), unable to face It again, takes his own life. Mike (Isaiah Mustafa) remained in Derry as the town historian and remembers everything, and has discovered an ancient Native-American ceremony called the “Ritual of Chud” that will defeat It once and for all.
It: Chapter Two is a frustrating case because for everything it gets right, it gets kneecapped by something wrong that makes the right elements all the more exasperating. Let’s start with the positives first. Its greatest strength by far is its casting of the adult version of the Losers Club (the kid versions return for a series of flashbacks), not just in how they look just like how you expect the grown-up versions of these kids to look, but also how the trauma inflicted upon them affected their psyche. At one point they have to split up to find personal artifacts from their childhood to sacrifice for the ritual, and in doing so they’re each confronted by Pennywise individually as well as the ghosts of their past. Bill is still racked with guilt over the death of his brother, Beverly never truly escaped the mental prison of her abusive relationship with her father, Eddie’s germaphobia still gets the best of him etc., with seamless transitions between the past and present. But while there are some genuinely frightening images with the many forms Pennywise takes, its most harrowing moments are the glimspes into the dark side of small-town America, whether its the brutal attack of a gay couple in the beginning, or the skin-crawling flashback to Beverly being accosted by her creepy abusive father.
While the first It wasn’t a masterpiece, it does succeed at the basic task of adapting a scary book while balancing its more humorous elements with genuine scares. Chapter Two tips the scales in one end a little too hard, and as a result, the scares more often than not end up getting undercut by the film’s attempt at humor. While Bill Hader and James Ransone have the best chemistry in the ensemble and slip seamlessly into their respective roles, but their constant bickering often gets in the way of the scares, which may have been an attempt to move the goal post when they realized in post how ridiculous some of these moments look. The most emblematic example of this problem is when Eddie is confronted by the leper from the first film, and out of nowhere, the song “Angel of the Morning” starts playing for five seconds.
And that’s the big problem that’s hindered every incarnation of this story, that makes thematic sense but still ultimately hurts it: aside the adult story being far less interesting than the kid story, it’s also far less scary. There might be some unintentional thematic reasoning behind it, illustrating a point that what scares kids and what scares adults are two completely different things. It’s why some of the more distressing scenes are the ones exploring the underlying ugliness of small-town America, and also why the supernatural scares were so much potent in Chapter One, but here feel more like a bunch of jump scares from a haunted house. One of this movie’s favorite tricks is to present something seemingly normal but slightly off-putting and then suddenly transform them into some big old CGI monstrosity. It worked the first few times, but by the third act I was half expecting David S. Pumpkins to start popping up out of nowhere.
Bottom line, It: Chapter Two is a bloated, frustrating letdown. There are genuinely frightening moments, plenty of fantastic performances, and a plethora of great ideas, but struggles to find a way to make them coalesce into something satisfying. Kinda funny that a movie with a running joke about an author being unable to write good endings would itself have a lousy ending.
6/10
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