It:Chapter 2

In 2017, Stephen’s King arguably most famous novel, IT, was brought to the screen. That movie focused on when the main characters were kids fighting the man-eating creature feeding on the children it terrifies, with Part 2 being promised to focus on when they’re adults who come back to destroy It once and for all.

The first It had a refreshing sense of heart, effective scares, and convincing performances all across the board, from the fresh new child actors and Bill Skarsgard as Pennywise, It’s primary form. It: Chapter 2 tries to recapture that lightning in a bottle but, save for the actors, just doesn’t come close.

It’s been 27 years since the events of the first movie and It is back feasting on the frightened children of Derry. The six surviving members (after one of them, Stanley commits suicide) of The Loser Gang that defeated it are now adults and come back to do everything they can to destroy Pennywise the Dancing Clown once and for all. Meanwhile, their past fears are revisited and long-term traumas are overcome.

The first act is genuinely solid, starting off with a grotesque assault that ends in easily the most gruesome and nauseating death in either of these movies. The actors they got to play the adult versions of the characters (Bill Hader, my favorite comedian working today, James McAvoy as Bill, the leader, Bill Hader as the smart-alecky Richie, Jessica Chastain as the sensitive and battered Beverly, Isaiah Mustafa as the book smart Mike, Jay Ryan as architect Ben, and James Ransone as the hypochondriac Eddie) are genuinely terrific, working great off each other and selling their long-term friendship, Hader especially has the best lines and is just naturally the most likable of all of them. We even get a great (though hardly scary) scene involving fortune cookies in a Chinese restaurant as well as some interesting backstory involving Its origins.

The last five minutes are even great too, wrapping up their relationships on a nicely emotional level. It’s every in between that the movie struggles.

The entire second act is literally just a video game, with each of the surviving losers going across Derry finding little tokens of their childhood. Any scariness that these scenes can give is destroyed by how repetitive the structure is. It literally just goes like this: One of them goes to find the token, then It scares them, jump-scare, jump-scare, jump-scare, and they get away.

The way It taunts the characters doesn’t even as the same impact because we already saw It do so in the first movie, and since then, some of them have gotten over their previous insecurities (particularly Ben, who as a child was chubby, but now is a beefcake). While Beverly is married to a man as abusive as her father was in her childhood, but there’s so little time spent on their relationship that it doesn’t have an impact.

Henry Bowers, the main bully from the first movie comes back but what the writers do with him is so underwhelming, he might as well not even be here.

It doesn’t help that the scares are so over-the-top that hardly any of them have the sneakiness that made the first It’s scares so memorable. It’s not a good sign where the only two scenes that are genuinely scary are when kids, who have nothing to do with the Loser’s group, are threatened by Pennywise (by the way, the disappearance of children all over Derry isn’t nearly as touched upon or felt by the citizens like it was in the first one).

The whole second act is riddled with scenes that would have worked so much better in the first movie. There’s a revelation about Ritchie’s character that shows what made him truly different from the other losers, but its placement in this film makes it just feels last minute and rushed. The losers even come across certain places that would have been nostalgic for the audience to experience with them, if they were actually in the first It movie at all.

In the first It, the humor was fitting because the main characters were kids, and it brought a nice sense of reliability. But here, it’s just obnoxious. There is a bizarre music cue during the time It attacks Eddie that I have been racking my brain since seeing the film, trying to figure out what it added to the scene. The climax also suffers from that with as played out and unfunny bit involving a dog.

Speaking of which, the climax is barely even worth the two hours of buildup, with the characters revisiting set pieces that simply worked better in the first movie and the way they fight Pennywise just feeling cliché and obvious.

While It: Chapter 2 does sell the relationship between the leads as adults, it sadly lacks just about everything that made the first one so special. Maybe the story really is better told as an intertwined story being told in the present with flashbacks to the past, or a horror movie where kids are threatened is just simply much scarier than when adults are on Its menu. Whatever the reason, I recommend seeing it just so you can finish the story, not because it ends it on a bang.