‘IT: Chapter Two’ is the hugely anticipated sequel to 2017’s ‘It’. The first movie proved to be a critical
and commercial success which saw the self-named ‘Losers Club’ endure the summer from hell as
they were haunted and terrorised by the evil entity which lurks through the fictional town of Derry,
Maine. The sequel takes place 27 years later in modern day, which sees the ‘Losers Club’ as adults,
with the return of Pennywise played by Bill Skarsgård and the original cast of young actors to play
their original roles in flashbacks.
So, to be blunt; this movie is extremely disappointing. It was my most anticipated movie of the year.
As soon as the credits rolled at the end of my first viewing of the first movie, I was counting down
the days until I got to see the sequel. I now wish I hadn’t spent so much time looking forward to it.
For a horror movie, it is severely lacking in genuine scares. The first movie was not tremendously
scary, but it countered that by bringing a sense of creepiness and dread to the movie. The sequel has
nothing to counter the lack of scares. The scariest thing about the movie is the run time, coming in at
just under 3 hours.
For a movie of this length, not a whole lot happens. It jumps from scene to scene, which are
ultimately the same thing. We see an adult ‘Loser’ by themselves, we get a flashback to them as
their younger selves, Pennywise appears to scare them in some form or another, we snap back to
their adult selves and then poxy Pennywise rocks up again to give them an aul shpook. Rinse and
repeat. It just got so repetitive. I realise that was pretty much the same structure in the first movie,
but at least in that movie we only had to sit through one scare per character, this time we have to sit
through two scares for most characters and it comes across mostly as filler. Filler. In a 3-hour movie.
As mentioned previously, it’s not all that scary. It relies on cheap jump scares, which more often
than not come across unintentionally as funny rather than scary. I honestly heard more laughs than
screams in the screening I was in. Like most jump scares, they are all so predictable. I could tell
exactly when a ‘scary’ part was going to happen right before it did. All it would entail is one of the
‘Losers’ would be looking somewhere, they turn away, they turn back and suddenly there’s a
‘monster’ there accompanied by a loud, ‘scary’ sound. These ‘monsters’ bring me on to my next
point nicely.
The CGI in this movie is abysmal. For a movie with a multimillion-dollar budget, you think they
would’ve spent a bit of that on decent special effects. I’ve seen better visual effects on PlayStation 2
games from the late 90’s. Utterly, utterly laughable. As myself and my friends were discussing after
the movie (shout out to Jack and Glenn), if you’re laughing at the things that are supposed to be
making you crap your pants, you’ve gone wrong somewhere along the line.
A few positive words for this movie, the actors’ performances for the most part are superb. I
personally really enjoyed the performances of Bill Hader (adult Richie), Isaiah Mustafa (adult Mike)
and James Ransone (adult Eddie). I thought that the three of them were the best thing about this
movie. Hader and Ransone really captured the essence of their characters previously played by the
younger actors in the first movie. Mustafa playing Mike had the difficult role of providing insight and
explanation to the returning ‘Losers’ who have all left Derry in the years since the first movie and
have since forgotten what happened. Mike never left Derry, so Mike never forgot what happened in
the summer of ’89. Hollywood powerhouses James McAvoy and Jessica Chastain weren’t given a
whole lot to do and I thought the movie wasted the abilities of two actors of their calibre. Skarsgård
as Pennywise was good, but I thought the material he had to work with was boarder line garbage.
The film simply did not use him enough for my liking, instead opting for crappy CG ‘monsters’.
All in all, ‘It: Chapter Two’ was a hugely disappointing follow up to one of my personal favourite
movies of this decade. They should’ve left it at the one movie. But we know how much studios love
money. If this movie makes anywhere near the amount of money the first movie made, we could
very well be seeing ‘It: Chapter Three’ sometime soon… and that is the scariest thing about this
movie.