IT CHAPTER 2 (2019) ** ½

It remains my favorite Stephen King book.  Because of that, the “half the story” bullshit It Chapter 1 pulled kind of stuck in my craw.  I mean if they were going to only go halfsies on the book, they could’ve at least kept the original structure, going back and forth between the young Losers and the middle-aged Losers as they do battle with the evil Pennywise the clown (Bill Skarsgard).  Now along comes It Chapter 2, which retains the structure of the book, keeping the young Losers around for flashbacks and/or repressed memories.  This is even more frustrating because… well… it works.  Why couldn’t they have just done this right from the get-go?  Maybe somewhere down the road director Andy Muschietti will re-edit both films to fit the book’s framework a la Francis Ford Coppola with The Godfather.  Till that day, both Chapters of It will be a near-miss for me.

The movie works up to a point, thanks to the expertly cast players, who do just as good of a job (if not better) playing the Losers as the young cast did in the first film.  James McAvoy makes for an ideal leader (thanks to his day job playing Professor X in the X-Men franchise), Jessica Chastain (who was also in Dark Phoenix with McAvoy) brings the same winning vibrance her younger counterpart (Sophia Lillis) brought to Chapter 1, and Bill Hader is the perfect match for Finn Wolfhard’s hilarious, foulmouthed Richie.  The only Loser who didn’t quite click for me was Isaiah Mustafa, mostly because I kept expecting him to jump into his role of the Old Spice guy at the most inopportune time.

The acting is top-notch, and Muschietti does a fine job making the town of Derry have a life of its own, but the overreliance shitty CGI monsters pretty much sinks every opportunity for genuine scares.  It doesn’t help that the monsters themselves (naked old women, eyeball bugs, clown spiders, etc.) are uniformly terrible.  Scenes that call more for atmosphere than computer trickery (like the bleachers scene or the mirror maze sequence) are far more effective.  The build-up to these moments is handled just fine.  It’s when the obviously phony monsters come lurching about, you just kind of shrug in indifference than recoil in horror.  Skarsgard’s performance is a bit of an improvement over the last movie (either he toned down the annoying clown voice or I’m just slowly becoming accustomed to it), although he’s far from what you would call scary. 

The worst bit comes during a blatant rip-off of one of the most iconic scenes from John Carpenter’s The Thing.  Except instead of the awesome practical effects of The Thing, they just use some more shitty CGI.  If you’re going to do a Thing homage, at least have the common decency to use practical effects.  Using CGI to recreate The Thing is downright blasphemous.  

The best scare comes early in the movie.  Usually in these films, they use a cat jumping into frame to give the audience a cheap jump scare.  In It Chapter 2, Muschietti trades the cat for… Peter Bogdanovich!?!  Let me tell you, purple ascots are scarier than red balloons any day.  

Speaking of cameos that immediately take you out of the movie, we also get a completely gratuitous cameo by the man himself, Stephen King.  This is King’s biggest role since Creepshow and while it’s kind of fitting, I guess, he’s not particularly good.  It’s not a patch on his fine performance in Maximum Overdrive, that’s for damn sure.  

There’s also a lot of meta commentary about how the endings of McAvoy’s stories always suck, which is a thinly veiled allusion to King’s endings.  It’s not so much as commentary now that I think about it. It’s more like the screenwriters were preparing you for the sucky ending they cooked up.  There are also more false endings here than in Return of the King.  To avoid that same mistake, I’ll quit this review while I’m ahead.