It Chapter Two ** (2019, Jessica Chastain, James McAvoy, Bill Hader, Isaiah Mustafa, Bill Skarsgård) – Movie Review

Director Andy Muschietti’s It (2017) sequel It Chapter Two (2019) is a bit of a disappointment, with dull adults wandering forlornly around their old home town of Derry, Maine, once again 27 years after their first encounter with the clown Pennywise (Bill Skarsgård) when one of their old crew, Mike Hanlon (Isaiah Mustafa), calls the others home for one last stand against the monster who has apparently sprung to life – or death apparently.

Gary Dauberman’s screenplay seeks epic status, but that only means that it is long, way too long at 169 minutes. You could take an hour out of the middle of it and it would be a much, much better movie. OK they want to give value, but it is very slow and draggy in the middle section, more sleep inducing than nightmare making.

On the plus side it plays like a nightmare, completely jumbled, disjointed, illogical and just as series of scenes rather than any kind of story. It has a dark, eerie, hallucinatory tone that is effective and even beguiling. But the rather mystifying and mysterious little playlets don’t build in a satisfying way to a delicious, creepy whole. They are just ‘and then, and then’ sequences that get nowhere much not very fast. [Even the climax is disappointing. In the end the monster is defeated in the most unconvincing, perfunctory kind of way.] The film is nasty in places but it is never actually scary at all.

Jessica Chastain, James McAvoy, Bill Hader, Isaiah Mustafa, Jay Ryan, James Ransone and Andy Bean do their best, but not much acting is required, and the normally very likeable Hader is stuck with a horrible ‘comedy relief’ role, which isn’t at all funny by the way, just irritating, and it is a further annoyance that he is the gay character (so he is ‘witty’ and ‘funny’, of course). This sticks out like a sore thumb as there is no other comedy in what is – commendably – quite a strong-toned horror film with disturbing violent content and bloody images throughout, pervasive language, and some crude sexual material.

So a plus is that it keeps the faith with horror, though the use of themes of queer bashing, wife beating and parental abuse in a horror film like this are extremely worrying, quite objectionable actually. They are there to give the film authority, meaning and importance, but they are too serious subjects for an essentially frivolous entertainment like this. We should not really be seeing this stuff at all here.

Two other huge strikes against the movie are the over-use of CGI and the peripheralising of Pennywise. He’s the main monster. He’s far more interesting than the grown-ups of the the Losers’ Club. So why didn’t they bring him on, full on? We can hardly see it’s Bill Skarsgård at all. It could be anybody. He’s totally wasted. Instead of sending in the clown, the director and writer feel compelled to send in the CGI whenever the movie flags, which is quite often, actually really rather a lot.

The young actors from the original movie reappear on a regular basis in flashbacks, which is one way is good and in another just emphasises how much more interesting they are as characters rather than as quite grumpy, bad-tempered grown-ups. The film makes you question the random return of Pennywise after 27 years, and that is damaging. For full enjoyment, it is important not to question anything about It at all.

So, moving on, let’s have It Chapter Three without any of the characters except Bill Skarsgård’s Pennywise, who can terrifying a whole new cast of, maybe this time interesting characters, maybe a new bunch of kids or teens. Perhaps Pennywise could come up against another movie monster, head off to the small town of Haddonfield, Illinois, and tackle Michael Myers, for instance. Jusayin’.

© Derek Winnert 2019 Movie Review

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