It: Chapter Two is, obviously, the completion of the story begun in It, and starts most of the folks from that movie: Bill Skarsgård, Jaeden Martell, Finn Wolfhard, Sophia Lillis, Jack Dylan Glazer, Chosen Jacobs, Wyatt Oleff, Jeremy Ray Taylor, and Nicholas Hamilton. Into this already crowded field we add James McAvoy, Jessica Chastain, Bill Hader, Isaiah Mustafa, Jay Ryan, James Ransone, Andy Bean, and Teach Grant.
Twenty-seven years after the events of It, the Loser's Club have all scattered to the winds and achieved varying degrees of success in their lives. Stan (Bean) has married and become an accountant. Bill (McAvoy) is a successful novelist and screenwriter (he's the King stand-in, as in many of King's novels). Bev (Chastain) seems like she's living successfully in terms of money and comfort, but she married a dude just like her abusive father. Likewise, Ed (Ransone) managed to marry a large, controlling woman very much like his mom. Richie (Hader) has channeled his foul mouth into a career as a stand-up comedian. Ben (Ryan) owns an architecture firm, but more important has gone from the fat kid to a tall, fit hottie. Only Mike (Mustafa) has remained in Derry, keeping tabs on the murder rate and watching for Pennywise (Skarsgård) to return.
He does, of course, and Mike puts out the call to the others, reminding them of the blood oath they swore. Stan commits suicide rather than return, but everyone else comes home and celebrates the reunion (before they know about Stan, of course). Mike manages to get them to agree to the Ritual of Chud, which can supposedly kill Pennywise.
And then we get an hour or more of them running around Derry, getting terrorized by Pennywise and by their old foe Henry Bowers (Grant) who survived the first movie and has been in a mental institution ever since. Eventually they manage to collect their "tokens" and remember their previous lives in Derry (and so we get more scenes of them as kids, which are probably the best part of this movie), and then descend into the sewers and beyond, fight the clown, and realize that they can beat it by yelling mean things at it until it melts. Oh, and poor Ed winds up getting skewered before Richie ever confesses his love. Alas.
If it sounds like I'm less enthused about this one...yeah. I knew that Chapter Two wasn't as well-received as the first one, but I did want to see how it ended and I found this DVD cheap at Half-Price Books, so what the heck. And...it's not all bad. The adult actors are mostly good. McAvoy and Ryan in particular manage to come off like good "updates" of their child actors' performances, as does Hader when he's not quipping (we'll get to that). Skarsgård continues to be creepy as hell as Pennywise. But...
OK, so if I had to name three things I really loved about It that weren't tied to Skarsgård, I'd have said: the chemistry between the actors, the pacing, and the practical effects. And this movie manages to lose all three. Let's take them each in turn.
In It, the filmmakers put these seven kids together for a summer and filmed the movie(s) with them, and the result is that their relationship felt real and organic. That obviously wasn't the case here, because apart from the initial scene in the Chinese restaurant, these people never feel like they click, which is a big deal for a movie where a central plot point is "you have to be together on this and it's your friendship that is key."
The effects...man. I don't know if they went to CGI over practical here, because I didn't watch any of the supplemental materials (they were on a separate disc and I couldn't be bothered to move my dog and change discs out), but the effects looked...bad. Like, the old nude woman, the leper, even Pennywise sometimes, looked like drawings that got stretched with a Photoshop tool, and they didn't look nightmarish like such things did in the first movie. The most effective moments were the ones with real people in the shot - Ed's mom (Molly Atkinson) tied to a gurney, the creepy-ass woman (Joan Gregson) slipping naked through the background of the frame when Bev comes calling.
And then there's the pacing. It was long, but I didn't feel the length. This was nearly three hours and I felt every minute, because the flow is so fragmented. It's a mess of the Losers as adults, jump back to the Losers as kids, jump to side characters getting killed, jump to exposition, jump to other Loser adults trying to leave Derry and getting roped back. It feels choppy and uneven.
And then there's the quipping. The first movie had a little of this, usually from Richie, but it was very clearly that Richie was being a loud-mouthed asshole because he was scared or angry and that's how he copes. Here, not only does Richie made stupid jokes while there is a monster from beyond time trying to kill him, but other people do it, too. Ed, in particular, makes a lot of stupid faces, but everyone (except Bev and Bill, as I think about it) make those post-Whedon "well that just happened" style jokes, and not one of them lands because that's not the kind of humor that fits here. (Oh, also, what the hell is going on with the blatant The Thing reference, down to Richie giving us Palmer's line when poor Stan's head becomes a head-spider? Fair's fair, though, the head-spider effects were pretty good, sound especially.)
I dunno. I think that a better approach might have been to focus entirely on the adults rather than give us constant flashbacks, but then that wouldn't have allowed using the child actors, who were so much more entertaining to watch. Overall, I'm glad It is so nicely self-contained, because I don't guess I'll be watching this one again anytime soon.
My Grade: D
Rewatch Value: Low. Not quite to the level of IINSIAIFWT, but it's a near thing
Next up: Johnny Mnemonic
No comments:
Post a Comment