IT: Chapter One took the world by surprise two years ago. The film was full of heart, childhood fear and adolescent wonder, and it really captured the spirit of not only the book, but what it’s like to grow up in both small-town America and a world full of threats that are so much bigger than you – human and monster alike. It wasn’t just a great horror movie, it was a great movie. Period.
Almost none of this is true about IT: Chapter Two.
Picking up twenty-seven years after the first film, we find the Losers Club all grown up and gone their separate ways, with little memory of what happened back in the golden days of their youth. But when the cycle begins anew, Mike – who never left Derry – calls them home to face down the source of their fears and destroy it once and for all.
The adult cast is mostly good, embodying their younger counterparts quite well. Unfortunately, the adult timeline loses much of the heart from the earlier one. The chemistry is off, and I think that’s mostly due to Bill not being the center of the group anymore. The focus shifts first to Mike, then ultimately to Richie, whose backstory is almost entirely – and unnecessarily – reworked. Both Mike and Richie are vital members of the Losers Club, of course – but Bill was always the leader, the glue that brought the group together and held them there. And that’s just not true here.
The film brings the adult cast together, only to split them apart again, sending them all on fetch quests for items from their pasts. This is a mistake. The film really meanders, and what little chemistry the adult group had is lost when they’re, well, not together. It’s a puzzling choice.
The tone of the second film is also radically different than the first. Chapter Two plays as a comedy most of the time, mostly due to the increased focus on Richie and Eddie, which hints at a relationship that does not exist in the book.
Also, Chapter Two references a couple moments that I recognized from the book – “Hi-Ho Silver!” – but that were – to my memory - left out of the first movie. So curiously, Chapter Two is trying to evoke nostalgia for moments that literally do not exist in the first film. Another strange choice.
One of the most touching elements from the first film – “January Embers” – gets seriously played out in Chapter Two. It becomes hackneyed, cliched, and leads to unearned melodrama between Bev and Ben. What should have been an emotional payoff falls flat and is drowned – literally – beneath buckets of blood.
Which leads us to perhaps one of the biggest mistakes of the movie: It’s not scary – it’s gross. In Stephen King’s own words, “gross-out” is the least of the three levels of horror – the others being traditional fright and high, existential terror. Chapter Two goes almost exclusively for gross moments, and that’s a mistake – especially considering that Chapter One was genuinely frightening.
I can’t escape the feeling that this is a prime example of a big success leading to overindulgence. I think after the success of the first, director Andy Muschietti was given too much rope, and we know what happens with too much rope. Chapter Two is simply too long and too much. Creative restrictions produce better work more often than not, and the seeming lack of restrictions on Chapter Two produced a bloated, fatiguing experience.
Chapter One was such a finely tuned film that this one simply pales in comparison. Chapter Two isn’t bad. But I can’t exactly say it’s good either. It’s fine. And as the follow-up to the biggest horror opening of all time, and – in my opinion – one of the best films of the genre ever made, fine just isn’t good enough.
Thanks for reading.
-a.