It's Back

You don't make the highest-grossing horror movie of all time without getting a sequel. And fortunately for that movie, It, a sequel was actually quite natural, since the first film adapted only half of Stephen King's original novel. It: Chapter Two now picks up the action in Derry, Maine 27 years later, as the monster of the first film -- not dead after all -- emerges from hibernation. The seven friends of the original, now adults, must reunite to finish the creature once and for all.

This sequel has plenty of thrills and scares, and a lot of good elements about it. But it's not quite as good as the first movie, and that starts with the source material itself. The "fight It again as adults" section of the book was always weaker. The kids felt so outmatched, felt like they had to overcome so much more, and experienced more visceral fears than the adults. And the ending of the book was rather unsatisfying (something this movie has great fun with). With all of that baked in from the start, it was inevitable that this new movie wasn't going to be as good as the first.

Yet it does have its moments. The casting is absolutely brilliant, with every single one of the actors (both the more famous and the less) being extremely credible adult versions of the child actors in the previous film. Particularly strong are James McAvoy as Bill (still haunted by the death of his brother), Bill Hader as Ritchie (whose reflexive snark yields most of the movie's biggest and best laughs), and James Ransone as Eddie (who still feels the most adolescent, and thus still has the most to overcome). But Jessica Chastain, Isaiah Mustafa, Jay Ryan, and Andy Bean too -- all have good moments in the movie, and all are dead ringers in look and demeanor for the kids who played their characters before.

The scares are hit and miss. Some moments really work, particularly the scenes that isolate Bill from the rest of the group, flashback to scares in the kids' pasts we didn't see before, and one scene that plays much like the first film's storm drain scene (showcasing actor Bill Skarsgård's creepy work as Pennywise). The scenes that depend more on CG are less successful, with some of the creatures so strange as to be more silly than scary.

The most effective moments are actually the most human ones -- Bill facing guilt, Stan coming up against his limitations, Ritchie confronted with his own deep secret, Eddie realizing his own strength, and more. But then, the scares are really what we're here to see. So the movie is a bit at war with itself, trying to serve a lot of narrative masters (and bloating to a run time of nearly three hours as a result).

And a couple of the human moments are quite discordant. One is the violent scene that opens the film, and the second is an early scene revolving around the character of Beverly. They're scenes not about supernatural horror, but about the "evils men do." Both scenes have been defended by cast and director as "important," key parts of Stephen King's original novel -- but I think there's a key contextual difference. The giant novel was, of necessity, split into two movies. What became the first movie provided a great many more horrors visited upon the characters by people, not Pennywise -- attacks by bully Henry Bowers, various abuses of the children by their parents (Beverly's being most traumatic), casual cruelty of Derry residents from the librarian to passing motorists. If one considers It as an entire piece, these two scenes in It: Chapter Two are very much thematically linked to the story. But separated out, as the only two such moments in a three hour film, they stand out as quite different from the CG-driven, supernatural horrors -- and they feel gratuitous as a result. Simply depicting violence that is true to life does not make it "important," not unless you're offering comment or catharsis on it -- which I don't believe this movie is.

Overall, It: Chapter Two is still worth seeing for those who liked the first movie. But it is a step down that I'll note by stepping the grade down to a B.