We were teased with a sequel as it began and with it making all the money, the sequel was inevitably greenlit. And it was given a larger budget, $79m, more than double the budget of the original.
But it seems there were some cutbacks when it came to writing, the original had 3 writers, Chase Palmer, Cary Fukunaga and Gary Dauberman, only Gary Dauberman returned to write the sequel.
The film made $473.1m at the box office, which is profitable but not even close to the $700m chapter 1 made, and the critical reception was more mixed and for good reason. And it’s on Rage4Media so you can guess which side of the divide I fall on. But why? Let’s take a look and find out.
We open back at the end of the last film, where we find out that whilst floating in IT Chapter 1, Beverly had visions of their future. Put this in the list of things that happen that ultimately amount to nothing.
We cut 27 years into the future, relative present day. At a carnival, a gay couple is subjected to a brutal homophobic attack, with one of them tossed off a bridge for good measure. How do I pick this apart? This happened in the book, more or less, from what I understand, but book accuracy isn’t the end-all of all things. It’s a really tasteless scene and I know that Derry Maine is supposed to be the home of the worst people, but this isn’t the 1980’s like the original, this is the 2010’s, and it hits a lot harder because of it.
Make what you will of whether or not that’s a good thing to do that, but what I will say it’s entirely unnecessary, they kill off a gay character (he’s taken by Pennywise) who was in a relationship and neither the boyfriend nor the bullies ever show up again.
The mini-series just started with a random child dying, it was over quickly to get it moving at a solid pace, of course they probably backed out of this scene because ‘eww, gay’ but it brings me to the issue that relegated this to rage4media, the pacing. This movie is nearly 3 hours long, it has no business being that long. I know it’s a ridiculously long book, but they covered half of it in 2 hours, this film did not need to be longer than that.
But back to the film, Mike gets wind of this and gets a clear message from Pennywise that he’s back. So, he makes the call and we catch up with the rest of the gang. Billy is now a famous writer for both book and screenplay but he his endings suck… I’m going to guess that’s inspired by King himself, who’s notoriously bad at endings. He has a wife for this one scene, she doesn’t show up at the end like she does in the book. Beverly has married an abusive asshat who’s very similar to her father. Eddie has married a terrifyingly co-dependant asshat, similar to his mother; also, he should know better than to use his phone whilst driving, it’s the 2010’s for crying out loud.
Eddie is working stand-up and is an alcoholic, apparently, and Ben is running a property firm. As for Stanley, well we all know what happens to him, so let’s not go into detail. As in the previous versions, their memories of the events of Chapter 1 are a bit fuzzy so they get a few flashes of it, we’ll later see some more new scenes featuring digitally de-aged versions of the young cast.
The crew all get their summons and head back to Derry, meeting in a Chinese restaurant. You know the witty banter I really enjoyed in the first one, I don’t know if it’s just me, but it really doesn’t work as well with them as adults, or maybe it’s just that their banter is much weaker and basically amounts to them saying f*ck f*ck f*cking f*ck for 3 minutes. All have arrived but as they begin to read the fortune cookies, they realise that Stanley isn’t coming, and IT is taunting them straight away with… OMG is that thing supposed to be scary? Normally a human face CG’d onto an object is terrifying but here I can’t help but laugh.
Before they’re scared out of the place, they encounter a kid named Dean, just go ahead and add him to the list of things that amount to nothing. They leave and for some reason Eddie and Richie think Mike lied to them? I’m kinda confused on that one. Anyway, they head off with Ben and Beverly to the hotel whilst Mike wants a word with Billy.
So, he makes him take some kind of drug and talks to him about the Ritual of Chüd, a native American ritual that could defeat Pennywise. Mike has an artefact related to the ritual but strangely one side is burned off. I will be coming back to this but for now, that’s enough to get Billy to try and convince the others to stay. Incidentally, it’s around this point Beverly reveals the visions she had of all of their deaths, sure, Bev, sure…
So, they meet up at the old clubhouse where Mike explains that for the ritual they need to sacrifice an item related to each of their pasts. For some reason, this means splitting up, so Pennywise can target them individually. So let’s get started with that, Bev heads to her old house, has a flashback of her abusive father and finds the old woman who lives there is actually…
ROFL, what is that?! I’m sorry, I can’t find this scary, I’m too transfixed on the massive <censored>. Her memory of choice is the love letter from Ben, who she still thinks is from Billy. Eddie next and he goes into the pharmacy which is run by the exact same people who ran it 27 years prior. He goes into the basement and has a flashback about seeing his mother being the target of the Lepper and having to abandon her because he’s so frightened. He picks up his old inhaler for the ritual
Ben remembers being bullied at school and another Pennywise encounter which makes him realise the signed yearbook page is his trinket, it’s been in his wallet for 27 years. Dude, you’re way too broken up on a crush in high school, it’s sad. Richie grabs an arcade token and remembers being harassed by Bowers. IT taunts him, with another rather looking CG statue, suggesting that he’s gay. It’s sad that he still felt the need to hide that in the 2010’s, yeah I think they’re implying he had a crush on Eddie, we will come back to this.
Bill heads into a pawn shop, manned by Steven King. OK, if Steven King told Bill he hated the ending of his book it’s clear both the writers and Steven King himself are well aware of what they’re referencing, good on King for taking it on the chin by the way. It’s honestly the funniest ‘joke’ in the film. He buys back his old bike and heads to the storm drain where his brother went missing, having his encounter with Pennywise there as he reaches for Georgie’s boat. Yes, they’re intent on having Billy go through basically the same arc as the last film. He has another encounter with Dean, as we’re building up to more time-killing.
Oh and this happened ages ago, but it’s just about to become important, but Bowers escaped the mental ward thanks to a visit from IT. Richie has a crisis of faith, but passes by the Synagogue and remembers Stanley’s Bar Mitzvah, and him standing up to his faith, if only grown-up Stanley had shown such balls. The group return to the hotel, minus Mike but Eddie says he’s leaving, so Ben goes to talk him out of it. Billy realises Dean is likely IT’s next target and rushes out to save him. Richie tries to leave more subtly, but gets caught by Bowers. He grabs the knife and manages to stab Bowers but it only briefly incapacitates him.
They regroup and make a run for it, with only a face full of knife to worry about. Mike as at the Library where Bowers makes a run for him, he’s able to dodge enough blows for the others to arrive and kill him. Meanwhile with Bill, unsurprisingly he fails to stop IT getting the kid, calls the others saying he’s going after Pennywise alone, but all show up and convince him otherwise.
To add more time-filling, we get more scares inside the crooked house before they manage to get inside. One of them is another Stanley monster in a fridge, which honestly is even less scary this time around. Eddie isn’t able to kill it, prompting some outrage from Bill until they enter the sewers and begin the ritual. It doesn’t work, Mike had scraped off part of the ritual that showed that IT killed the Native Americans who did this before, so… why does this exist? Who the heck creates an artefact for a ritual that details the ritual including the fact that it didn’t work? And it brings me to a huge problem, with the way they engineered this story around this ritual, much of the last 2 hours have been entirely pointless.
So IT survives and is now also a silly-looking CGI spider and each of our heroes are trapped in a new nightmare. Billy is with his younger self and Georgie, and it’s revealed that Bill overplayed his sickness that day because didn’t want to go out in the pouring rain. I don’t blame him. That guilt weighs on both of them but it ends pretty quickly this time because we already did this in the last film.
Bev is stuck in a bathroom and gets a greatest hits version of all the crap that happened to her. Blood, bullies, a Shining reference for some reason. Ben is in the old hideout as it’s being buried. Meanwhile Eddie and Richie get to do a door problem, with monsters behind each door. Each one funnier than the last. Long story short, they all get out of their crazy nightmares and it’s back to the business of confronting and killing the clown. Eddie tries to get a shot in but it doesn’t work and he’s fatally wounded.
So, how is IT defeated? The Neg it to death. I’m deadly serious. You know, I mocked them defeating a psychological threat like IT by beating the sh*t out of it in the last film, but you can go too far in the other direction. They just should ‘clown’ at it until it shrinks away and then, they rip his heart out, Black Lantern style and crush it. Oh, and Eddie’s dead, unsurprising, since it happened in the book, still it’s another (potential) gay couple crushed by Pennywise.
So, with Pennywise dead, Ben and Beverly get together, he had helped her through the bathroom dream and revealed he was the one who wrote the note. They all say their goodbyes and pay their tributes to Eddie, and get messages from Stanley saying he sacrificed himself because he knew he couldn’t go through with it, and tries to frame it like he’s doing this to help them?
They seem to be maintaining their memories this time around because ‘there’s more they want to remember than forget’ ok…
So, that was IT Chapter 2 and it was a snooze.
I liked the first chapter, and for what it’s worth, there were good elements to this one too, the cast is fantastic, and the digital deaging is actually pretty solid for the most part, mostly because for once they have physical representations of what the actors looked like in the first film and also because it’s only a few years, unlike with certain other films.
The same praise can’t be given to the rest of the special effects, they range from unintentionally horrifying to mostly laughable and since so many of the scares are CG now, it really hurts the horror value.
But as I’ve made abundantly clear, my biggest issue is the length, 2 hours and 50 minutes, at least an hour of it didn’t need to be in the film. Dean could have cut out entirely with almost no changes. Bowers added virtually nothing to the plot, half the flashbacks weren’t necessary, and the film added Pennywise kills for no reason at all.
Rage Rating 48%
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