44 POP CULTURE FILM REVIEWS BY AMY DIAZ
It Chapter Two (R)
The kids of the Losers Club have grown into unhappy adults who are summoned back to Derry, Maine, in It Chapter Two, a sequel to the 2017 adaptation of part of the Stephen King novel.
This movie covers what I hope is the rest of it. I mean, I haven’t read the book but I’m really hoping there isn’t some kind of epilogue or unexplored side-plot that could be spun into three additional movies. The movie spends time in both the present day and 27 years earlier, the time frame of the first movie. Thus do we see both nervous kid Stanley (Wyatt Oleff) and soft-spoken adult Stanley (Andy Bean). Jokey kid Richie (Finn Wolfhard) becomes comedian Richie (Bill Hader). Allergic and anxious Eddie (Jack Dylan Grazer) becomes risk analyst Eddie (James Ransone). Kind-hearted Ben (Jeremy Ray Taylor), who was bullied for his weight, is now fit architect Ben (Jay Ryan). Grief-stricken Bill (Jaeden Martell) becomes grief-stricken author Bill (James McAvoy). Sad Mike (Chosen Jacobs) is now obsessed Mike (Isaiah Mustafa). And Beverly (Sophia Lillis), a girl with a lousy creep of a dad, is now Beverly (Jessica Chastain), a woman with a lousy creep of a husband. When a mutilated body is found, Mike — who spends his days living above the Derry library and listening to the police scanner? — calls up the other Loser Club members. It’s time to come home, he says, time to do what we vowed to do and put an end to the evil. Mike who?, they ask. Apparently, as the other “Losers” left town and started lives elsewhere, their memories faded — of Derry, each other and even the terrifying evil-in-clownform Pennywise (Bill Skarsgard), who appears around town every generation to kill people and be creepy. They have a general sense of the importance of going back and also of dread and, as they meet up for a meal at a Derry restaurant, they remember each other and can even joke about how they have and haven’t changed. Slowly, they also remember Pennywise and Mike reminds them of their childhood vow, after they fought him last time, to come back to face him again if he reappeared.
It Chapter Two
Delightfully, these adults react the way most normal adults would react to childhood vows to face a soul-shaking evil, which is to say “no flipping way.” Eventually, though, they are drawn back in, particularly Bill, who is still not over Pennywise’s murder of his little brother Georgie all those years ago. Also summoned by Pennywise’s reappearance is Henry Bowers (Teach Grant), in prison for murders committed during the first movie. He is once again ensorcerlled by It, the other name for the Pennywise evil, to serve as a totally unnecessary lurking bit of menace and movie story padding. In between the emotional turmoil of our leads, we see vignettes of Pennywise’s attacks on current victims, just in case you were worried that you might miss some creepy clown behavior and some children-in-peril scenes. (The movie also features an early adults-in-serious-peril scene that is disturbing and hard to watch and that’s before the supernatural element shows up. An evil clown that eats people isn’t as awful as standard issue human evil.) Oh, good, I thought as we watch Pennywise use every “stranger with candy in a van” line to entice a victim, I was afraid this movie wouldn’t play on my real-world parenting fears. (I do not need movies to mess with my real-world parenting fears. The news does that just fine, thanks.)
Weirdly, the best parts of the movie mix campy horror with humor, frequently connected to the adult response to what I thought of as the “too much evil clown” problem of the first movie. The scary evil clown is still scary and evil but it’s also sort of daffy. (And still scattered, conceptually, as a Big Bad.) The “absurdity of the still-terrifying situation” turns out to be an entertaining flavor of horror. But. It Chapter Two does not need to be nearly three hours. It is at least an hour too long, possibly more, especially considering how much time it spends not accomplishing things. The movie seems to want to give that time over to making its characters more layered, adding more emotional weight built in part with flashbacks to the 1980s setting. Instead of enriching the characters, though, this feels repetitive. We don’t get more sides to Ben and how the boy became the man who clearly enjoyed enormous professional and personal success but still harbored deep feelings for Beverly. Instead, we get more “fat kid” stuff. I feel like, in 27 years, there’s probably more to him than that. And speaking of Beverly, fairly or unfairly, I hate everything about how this “she’s the girl one and she has girl problems” character is developed. I say “unfairly” because maybe that’s how she’s written — thin and one-note like the others but with an irritating-to-me
blend of damsel and Wendy from Peter Pan — and maybe a version that I would have liked would have been just as one-note. But still, this movie made choices about what to show us, about re-enforcing the sketch we already had of young Beverly and giving us an equally scant read on now-Beverly, and I did not like those choices. I feel like there was probably a more interesting way to make the character flawed or insecure or whatever the movie was going for. It’s not just Ben and Beverly; nearly everybody gets the short shrift character-wise. Bill Hader does all of the heavy lifting when it comes to the character development given to Richie. Eddie is mostly played for laughs. Mike seems like his story is potentially the most interesting; he stayed in Derry, he remembers and he has become obsessed (“a mad man,” Pennywise not inaccurately calls him). It’s a nice character beat that is restated a couple of times but not developed. McAvoy’s Bill gets the most meat and I feel like the movie sort of lucked out that McAvoy — like Hader — can bring twice as much to a part as is on the page. Thus we can see how not just the Pennywise stuff but the loss of Georgie and the associated guilt has impacted his life. Because of McAvoy, it’s relatively well-done stuff. Just, not worth three hours. I liked It Chapter Two more than the first movie but I’m not sure it was “better” and I have no idea how fans (of either the book or the initial outing) will feel. For me, the movie’s more self-conscious stance in relation to its central villain worked. (At least, it worked specifically when the Losers were facing off with Pennywise. “Humans versus inhumanity of other humans” scenes were not successful.) While the serving was entirely too large, the meal wasn’t bad. C+ Rated R for disturbing violent content and bloody images throughout, pervasive language, and some crude sexual material, according to the MPAA. Directed by Andy Muschietti with a screenplay by Gary Dauberman (based on the novel by Stephen King, who clearly took a page from the Stan Lee book and decided to get in on the fun in a scene that is tonally weird but I didn’t hate it), It Chapter Two is an unnecessary two hours and 49 minutes, not counting a second of trailers, and distributed by New Line Cinema.
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