The loser’s club is all grown up, but their adventures have lost a step this time around.
As soon as I finished watching It a couple of years ago, I knew that the sequel was going to be in trouble. For one, I recognized that the next film would need to age up its protagonists by 27 years. It’s hard enough for adults to replicate the easy chemistry of kids that age, but these particular kids were so damn good that the task seemed impossible. Plus, King’s original story has its own structural problems. It peaks in the middle (i.e. the end of the first movie), then repeats all the same beats a second time to lesser effect. Sure enough, these flaws did impact It: Chapter Two. In fact, the the whole endeavor was a little bit “lesser than”. There are more horror scenes built into the script, but an over reliance on easy jump scares and some dodgier-than-expected CGI deaden the impact. The exposition is delivered in a far more clunky manner. Bill Skarsgard, as Pennywise, doesn’t quite pop off the screen the way he did in the first film. Bill Hader’s Ritchie is a fantastic highlight, but one that’s still no match for Finn Wolfhard’s note-perfect portrayal.
Yet, I didn’t hate this movie. In fact, I liked it pretty well and think it serves as a good companion to its 2017 counterpart. Despite the hurdles outlined above, the casting is actually very good, and the actors generally do a nice job. Some of the big set pieces transcend the more bland scares elsewhere in the film, particularly Bill’s foray into a hall of mirrors to try and save a doomed Derry child and Beverly’s visit to her childhood home. The filmmakers are smart to include several flashbacks to footage of the characters as children, filmed at the same time as the first movie (but new to us.) This continuous reminder of the bond between the so-called loser’s club is a crucial element of the film, especially since the plot demands that they start out having forgotten all about their shared experience in the summer of 1989, thanks to a supernatural shroud over their cursed hometown. Ultimately, I walked away satisfied, just not floating like I did the first time around (pun probably intended). There is a scene from the first chapter that takes place in a rock quarry that has nothing to do with Pennywise or the overarching plot, but it is so gorgeously shot and such a sweetly nostalgic look back into adolescence that it trumps any scene that occurs in Chapter Two. That’s why an ostensibly “B” horror film feels like a failure, because we’ve seen what it looks like when it’s an “A”.
Comentarios