It Chapter Two movie review- by Chris Stuckmann

Full text transcript of It Chapter Two movie review:

It chapter two picks up twenty seven years after the first one ended, this time the Losers Club finds themselves called back to Dary once again when their old friend Mike, who still lives there, discovers that Penny Wise is back to his evil ways once more. So, the losers have to band together once again to figure out how they can defeat that evil dancing clown. This was one of my most anticipated films of the whole year where I thought the first one was really good. Captured the spirit of part of the novel really well. Kid performances were awesome. Direction was fantastic. And since the whole team is coming back for this one, plus James McAvoy, Bill Hader, Jessica Chastain and all these amazing talents, my excitement was through the roof. And there’s a lot to like about this movie. And there’s some things that I’d like to discuss that I don’t like. Much discussion has been made about the It film’s length. Two hours and forty nine minutes, its long, long fucking movie and you can feel it. There are scenes that are boring and you’re like, Jesus Christ, there’s an hour left. And you have to acknowledge that there’s parts of the movie where you’re like, wow, this is really lengthy. And that’s a problem with pacing because other Stephen King films like The Green Mile don’t feel long to me because it’s paced so well in the characterization is done so brilliantly that I never really feel that length while I’m watching it.

But here we bounce around so much between past and present and characterisation is kept to a minimum for these adults because we know that when they were kids. But 27 years have gone by now. So obviously they’re completely different people and they keep that characterization to like one scene each. Bill Hader has an embarrassing stand up act. Jessica Chastain is living in an abusive house. They try to do their best to set up who these people are now, but they really want to get them to dairy. And so it feels kind of rushed at first. And then once they’re in dairy, it feels like they’re just kind of dragging everything out for a long time. But everyone in this movie is really strong, especially Bill Hader. I think he probably has the best arc in the whole film. And so for that reason, I cared about his character the most. He’s also very funny in the movie. And early on, once these characters all meet up to have dinner, you can really feel that camaraderie again and that chemistry between these characters. And they do a good job of making it feel like it’s the people that we saw before those kids. They do a good job of really making it seem like it’s them. This is really top notch casting. But just like the first film, Bill Skarsgard, as Penny wise to me is the real standout. This is such a great role for an actor.

Tim Curry was amazing in the miniseries and Skarsgard is so creepy as this character, but similar to part two of that original 90s mini series, this film is not as good as the first one. It’s very uneven since these characters do have to split up. The film doesn’t have much of a narrative except that they’re all trying to look for the same thing and Pennywise is back and killing random kids. So that’s not good. So we have to go find some shit and then fight Pennywise and when you actually break down what the movie is doing. It’s weird that it’s as long as it is, because it’s really just about getting these guys back to dairy. They got to find this thing and then they got to try to fight Pennywise. And for some reason, it’s three hours. Now, look, I fucking love Stephen King, and the book is phenomenal and very long. But there are things that just don’t have to be in the movie. There are sequences here that go on for too long. There’s a very strange scene in an antique shop that was cool, but like really on the nose and like really long and just felt kind of unnecessary to me. And I’m well aware of things that are in the book that aren’t in the movie and things that are in the book that are in the movie. And I understand that, you know, there’s always an argument to be made about, well, that’s in the book.

So that’s why it’s in the movie. But that’s not how adaptations work. You have to know what to cut. And in the case of this movie, I think they just put too much in. I think the biggest reason that this story from the perspective of a child has always been better to me than when they were adults is because of the way a child would react to something like Pennywise the Clown. That would be the scariest shit you have ever seen in your life. And from the perspective of a kid, the movie is automatically a lot scarier from the perspective of an adult. Sure, some of the things that they encounter is rather horrible, but some of them are just copy and pasted from the same fears they had as a kid. For instance, Eddie is still horrified by germs and so the leper is still coming after him, whereas other characters seem to have more adult fears that have manifested over time and gotten even worse. Some are just still scared of the same shit from when they were like 12. And so it doesn’t work as well. From a perspective standpoint, I’m not as scared. One penny wise jumps out at James McAvoy because he’s fucking James McAvoy. And this film, more than any horror film I’ve seen recently, has been a big reminder for me, and that is that the perspective that your film is told from is extremely important. It’s the characters that you choose to let the audience in through can drastically change how you feel about the movie, because this is the same team as last time, making another one and it’s just not as scary as before.

But the thing that took me out of the film the most was actually a technical choice. They had to age some of these kids through CGI because they just looked too old. Now, from the filming of the last movie, particularly Finn Woolford, who I guess got really tall and he has a lot of work done to him, CGI wise, and it is really distracting for me. I saw this on a huge screen and I couldn’t help but notice. Also, the other big thing is that it seems like they’re using ADR or some sort of post-processing pitch wise with some of these kids voices to alter them. And some of them sounded like every single line they were saying had been processed differently in post, really distracting. And I could not get invested in those scenes because it was just like assaulting me with this choice. And I get that had to happen. Some of these kids just don’t look the same anymore. And if it’s supposed to be the exact same time period, it wouldn’t work. Still, what made the film watchable to me was this cast. The cast is really pitch perfect. Everyone’s really good in the movie and you start to care about their characters because they’re just giving such good performances.

The scares are not as scary as the first film. Some of that is due to a perspective shift. Some of that is due to the fact that in the first film they hid Pennywise a lot more. He’d be in the shadows, he’d be obscured or he’d be in another form. And this film, they kind of just show him walking around in broad daylight sometimes and it loses the mystique. Nevertheless, it chapter two, I think is OK. It’s not as good as the first. It’s about the way I feel about the second part of the miniseries. I’m going to give it Chapter two, a C plus. Guys, thank you very much, as always, for watching. So if you follow me on Twitter, you would have seen that I saw a movie called The Phanatic with John Travolta. This film. I cannot wait to talk about it. I will have a hilarious video of that very soon, my first hilarious hilariousness since I believe menos the hands of fate, that’s going to be really fun. And I can’t wait to share that with you guys in the next few days. I hope as long as the edit comes together the way I think it will and there’s no absurd copyright claims, we should be good guys. Thank you so much, as always, for watching. Look forward to more reviews very soon. And if you like this, you can click right here and get stuck. Minimized.