Review: It Chapter 2

Splitting Stephen King's novel It into two films always made just enough sense to seem a reasonable move. The book is massive, with a huge cast and a timeline that stretches at least 27 years (if you cut out all the history stuff; if you don't, we're talking a century or more). Obviously if you wanted to tell the story right, you were going to need more time than the bladders of movie-goers would allow; with the cast already going to be played both as kids and world-weary grown-ups, splitting the timeline up into two movies, well... made just enough sense to seem a reasonable move.

Unfortunately for anyone hoping King's big statement on horror would turn into a movie with the same kind of impact and resonance, much of what makes King's novel work is the way that it is in large part about the horror of a): being a kid and b): being a grown-up dragged back into the world of being a kid. For this to work, you really need the two playing out side by side; you split them up, and you just have a bunch of grown-ups being startled by all kinds of silly shit.

Also, much of the tension in the novel comes from the kids and grown-ups story lines playing out side by side; as you read the novel you know the kids somehow managed to fend off Pennywise the Clown (Bill Skarsgard), but you have no idea how - and part of the horror of the small town of Derry is that once you grow up (and especially when you leave), you forget what you faced as a child. Is the price required to defeat Pennywise something that as adults they'll find too costly to bear? Is it possible that they've lost the childish belief that enabled them to win and now they're all doomed? Let's find out!

Oh wait, we saw all that already in the first movie. Which goes a long way towards making this one of the least scary horror films in recent memory. Not from lack of trying, mind you: when the now grown-up Losers from the first film are summoned back to Derry by Librarian Mike Hanlon (Isaiah Mustafa), the only one who’s stayed in town, much of their time is spent split up and facing their own fears in an attempt to figure out what they’ve lost.

Unfortunately, much of what they’ve lost in the transition from page to screen is their characters. Bill Denbrough (James McAvoy) is a best-selling horror writer whose sole defining feature is that he’s bad at endings; Beverly Marsh (Jessica Chastain) escaped her abusive dad for an abusive husband who she simply leaves and never mentions again (the idea that the grown-up Losers are just repeating their childhoods would have more impact if we ever got any real sense of what their actual adult lives are like).

Richie Tozier (Bill Hader) is a snarky abuse comedian – much of the praise for Hader’s performance (which is legitimately good) comes from the fact that he’s literally the only adult Loser with a distinct personality – while the sweet but chunky Ben Hanscom (Jay Ryan) is now a studly architect, jittery hypochondriac Eddie Kaspbrak (James Ransone) is a jittery risk assessor and thoughtful Stan Uris (Andy Bean) probably shouldn’t have thought quite so much about what returning to Derry would be like.

In the novel, a lot of the horror in the adult sections comes from the way Pennywise - who can't directly kill adults, although maybe he can - manipulates the mundane horrors of the adult world to serve him. Here that's reduced to a brief and forgettable subplot involving the return of one of their childhood bullies, mullet still intact. 

Then again, pretty much everything here is reduced to a brief subplot (the novel's most powerful idea, that Pennywise's centuries of evil have soaked into Derry and turned the whole town rotten, is all but ignored); every character has to get at least two scary encounters with Pennywise, and once you've got to fit in twelve jump-scare packed scenes and a big climax there just isn't much room left for anything else even when you're pushing three hours.

That said, while it may not hang together well as a film It Chapter 2 does definitely have some memorable moments; the film's most frightening scenes don't involve the Losers at all. And Pennywise does get to pull off a few bizarrely surreal antics to remind audiences that he's meant to be an almost Lovecraftian avatar of unknowable evil, not some cannibal bozo. 

But the split in structure does irreparable damage to the story, and the numerous flashback scenes featuring the younger cast don't help (none of them are scary for starters, which constantly defuses what little tension the film builds up). Stephen King's novel is notorious for being an overstuffed mess; somehow, this film manages to outdo him.

- Anthony Morris

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