Review of It Chapter Two- by Sean Chandler

Full text transcript of Review of It Chapter Two:

So Mike in this movie is played by the star of The Man, your man could smell like Old Spice ads. Look down, back up. Where are you? On a boat with the man your man could smell or as I call it, the greatest commercial of all time. But today, we’re not talking about how he smells, but him battling a cloud. So let’s talk about. Twenty seven years after the events of the first It film, the losers have to get back together to battle Pennywise again. Real quick, before I give you my take on the film. Be sure to tell me what you thought down below in the comment section. Was it awesome? Was it awful? Did it disappoint you or was it even better than the first film? I’d love to hear your take down below. With that said, let’s get started talking about the good. The first thing you got to talk about with this film is that they just did a phenomenal job of finding actors, even some A listers who you absolutely believe are the grown up versions of the kids from the first films. Every single one of them is perfect for these parts. A couple of standouts for me. What was James McAvoy, who’s kind of the emotional anchor of the film? He probably does. The emotional heavy lifting in this film has kind of the most crying scenes breakdown, stuff like that. Inside of it.

Others stand up for me was Bill Hader, who is hilarious inside of the film, just steals a bunch of scenes, gets a bunch of one liners in there that breaks the tension at just the right times. And then you get to talk about Bill Skarsgard as Penny Wise, the dancing clown. There’s something about the performance that just has a likability about it while being incredibly disturbing. No matter what he’s doing, even if he’s just having a conversation and looking at you all smiling, there’s something so horribly off about all of it. It just gets under your skin even while you’re kind of like, well, that’s kind of cute. Oh, I kind of feel bad for him. He doesn’t have any friends that want to play with him. But you also know at the same time, this thing is creepy and terrifying, but really the entire cast was quite good. Next thing I want to talk about was the direction in most of this film is very meticulously directed. For example, in the first act of the film, as we’re kind of catching up on each of the losers and seeing where they’re at, it transitions like seamlessly from each character to the next character and has very clever ways of just making this one very smooth sequence as we catch up with each one of them. Then throughout the middle of the film, our different characters are kind of going around the city and having these flashbacks of their childhood.

Once again, these smooth transitions between them has grown up to them as children and from one of the adults to one of the other adults altered in a way that’s artistic, clever and very well thought out. Then, as this is a horror film in many of these scary sequences inside the film are crafted really nicely, whether you’re talking about the fact that they transition from something that kind of makes you laugh a little bit to disturbing imagery. And even the way Pennywise moves is kind of freaky in its own way. And as I’ve mentioned a few times already, the movie does have a nice sense of humor, but it’s not overdone. A lot of it does come from either the quirkiness of Penny Wise or Bill Hater’s character is actually kind of delivering punch lines inside of the film. But none of it just feels like overly set up jokes or anything like that. It feels organic, like it did in the first film, except with an adult. This is also a kind of a bigger story in the way sequences happened, the way that it’s directed. It felt pretty clearly like they had a bigger budget for this film so they could do some bigger sequences. Like I mentioned before, the transitions through the characters and sequences. All of this made the film feel like a much grander story that they were telling.

And some of that goes back to the fact that they’re expanding the mythology with this film. Everything was set up in the first one here. We kind of dig deeper about Pennywise, how long he’s been here, why is he here and how do you defeat them? And so all of it felt like they were trying to tell this bigger story about defeating him and how are they going to come together to try and battle penny wise? And I think even the budget, the production all brought that to the table. With that said, let’s move out of the mixed aspects of the film. The big one here is that this movie can feel very different from the first film for the most obvious reason that the original film, they were kids, it kind of doing this coming of age story here they are grown ups, remembering their past. And those are two very different types of experiences that bring out different types of emotions. And therefore the films feel different. But even the way some of it is directed, the type of storytelling that’s happening in particular in the first act is different from what we saw in the first film. As you move into the second act of the film, there’s quite a few kind of flashbacks to their childhood, and that’s different storytelling once again. And this isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

It’s not a good thing. It’s just something to know that if you just wanted the movie to be more of the same, it’s not really that it has things that are the same, but it’s a different type of story that they’re telling with different types of emotions and of course, with adults as the stars. And then again, if you want something different, this is a different type of film with a lot of the same types of elements from there. Let’s move on to the back. Unfortunately, there’s quite a few problems here with the story. First off, the amount of plot that we have does not justify this runtime. I’ve seen some people online to. Ating, why a lot of people were entirely OK with the runtime of endgame, but they’re complaining about the runtime of it, Chapter two, and I think the reasons are pretty straightforward in game had a lot more plot. It moved a lot faster and it was trying to resolve way more plot lines within game. It’s hard to imagine what they could cut out of the film with this movie. As I left it, I was thinking, I don’t understand how this movie was almost three hours long. And it’s a movie where I could imagine a lot of sequences that you could just easily cut out of the film. Like you can summarize the entire plot of the movie as follows.

And this isn’t a spoiler or anything like that. But the losers come back to town, the losers walk around town, the losers battle. Pennywise that’s basically the entire movie. Summarize in three short sentences. Now, a lot of things happen inside of each of those categories, but it’s a very simple and straightforward plot line for the film, in which case I just look at it and I go, they could have tightened this film up a whole lot. Which leads us to our second big problem. The middle act is incredibly repetitious. There’s a whole bunch of scenes and sequences that are all basically the same as the one that came right before it. Someone goes somewhere, remember something from their childhood. They get scared by Penny Wise and they learn something about themselves. Then another person goes somewhere. They remember something scary from their childhood. They’re scared by Penny Wise and they learn something about themselves. Repeat that four or five more times. And that’s the middle act of the film. No, I didn’t think that any of the specific scenes themselves were particularly bad. They were all quite good and had something interesting about them, but they were all basically the same. You could have skipped any one of them and not really missed out on anything inside of the film. But the person I went to see the film with left to go to the bathroom in the middle.

He came back and I went, I don’t really need to tell him what happened. He could figure it out. He didn’t miss anything important. It was a fun sequence, but he didn’t miss anything to make another end game comparison. Before the Blu ray came out for Endgame, they released this deleted scene of a bunch of people kneeling for Tony Stark. And they explained the reason they cut it out of the film wasn’t that they didn’t like the sequence, but it made the next scene that happened. It just feel like it was repeating the exact same emotions and communicating the exact same thing. This movie has had six scenes that are six sequences in a row that repeat the same basic emotions and communicate the exact same thing. The third big story problem is that all these sequences in the middle of the film could take place in any order whatsoever. You could recut the film, just move them all around. It wouldn’t really change anything. What that means, as you’re watching the story, is that scenes don’t build the story as you’re going along. It doesn’t build momentum or urgency. It’s just a bunch of different things we’re supposed to see in a forty five minute chunk of the film. But none of it feels like it’s building towards something. You don’t feel like you’re moving forward. You’re just moving sideways to different places.

And then suddenly it moves forward really quickly. Once you move out of the middle of the film. A lot of times in my reviews I talk about a story being well crafted. This felt like the opposite of that. It was just a bunch of sequences that in and of themselves are really good. But the way they’re all put together just kind of felt a little bit lazy to me. Real good. Before I give you my final score on this one, be sure to share your thoughts down below in the comments section. Also, come back tomorrow. I’m going to rank the movies with the mini series. So if you want to hear my take on the mini series from back in nineteen ninety, come back tomorrow. Unfortunately, Chapter two is definitely a step back from chapter one. The performances are still fantastic and some of the direction is great here, but there’s not nearly enough story to justify this runtime in the middle that is very repetitious. It’s only a B minus overall it’s a six point five on the entertainment scale. And if you watch the original one, you should check this one out too. But be prepared to be disappointed. Remember to come back tomorrow to check out my raking in the movies and find out what I thought about the nineteen ninety mini series. Thank you so much for watching and keep talking movies too much.