Movie Breakdown: IT: Chapter Two (Noah)
Pre-Screening Stance:
I gave IT: Chapter One another spin prior to my screening of its predecessor and it held up surprisingly well. The kids are good, Pennywise is fantastic, and the plot barely stops long enough for anyone to take a breath amongst all the scariness. That said, the sequel’s three hour run time post the success of Chapter One does indicate that Andy Muschietti was given a far longer leash on this one. What that means, well, guess we’re all going to find out.
Post-Screening Ramble:
IT: Chapter Two is a three hour long hour film. It seems superficial to call out the run time of a film in the opening sentence of a review, but the length of this film says just about everything there is to say about it. On one hand it is a film drunk on its epic length, a bloated, oft times vapid movie that manages to emulate, nearly to a tee, the exact plot points of the first film just with two more hours of padding forced between them. Twenty-seven years have ticked by since the last time we saw Stan, Bev, Eddie, Richie, Mike, Ben and Bill – precocious little youngsters – fight off the fear-sucking evil of the scariest clown this side of the Atlantic Ocean – Pennywise (Bill Skarsgard). And now Derry, Maine hold-out Mike Hanlon (Isaiah Mustafa) has cashed in on the oath from the end of Chapter One: the clown is back and everyone has to return to put it down for a final time. But, everyone isn’t doing so hot – Bev (Jessica Chastain in a terribly underwritten role) is entangled in an abusive relationship, Richie (Bill Hader) is a successful comic with a secret, Ben (Jay Ryan) has morphed from a chubby butterfly to a stunning architect still holding a candle for Bev, Eddie (James Ransone) is, well, Eddie, Stan (Andy Bean) is still scared, and leader-of-the-pack Bill (James McAvoy) is a horror writer who can’t stick the landing. A lot of the bloat comes in the opening hour as Muschietti introduces these characters back to us, hammering in just how much we enjoyed them in the first movie, how great their relationship was and how the trauma of the first film still lingers in all of them. And it only really feels like bloat because the introductions of the character’s lives outside of Derry never really adds up to anything. Yeah, Bev is a meeker woman because of her husband’s violent tendency but it never becomes an issue outside of the fact that Pennywise’s form seems to focus on the men in her life who’ve done her wrong. It never feels like Bev (or Bill or Eddie) ever grapple with the trauma in a personal way, but rather just focus on Pennywise as the source of their pain and do what they need to dispatch him. It’s a three hour film that only touches on the emotional narrative when it needs to, relying instead on our memories of the first film for any dramatic direction. Once the exposition is out of the way, Muschietti gets down to what he does best – shocking, horrific, somehow fun, moments of terror weaved around likable characters and their massive insecurities. For a big budget horror film, IT: Chapter Two has some truly disgusting imagery (the baby-faced fly-larva really got me) you don’t see on the big screen very often. Strangely though, what it does best is just follow the narrative outline of the first film – the group has terrifying moments with the clown, the group has to separate, the group has more terrifying moments with the clown, then the group has to come back together to defeat the clown. It is, quite frankly, the same film with different, older, more established actors, and an hour and a half of hot air blown right up it. Which isn’t a terrible thing. The Loser’s Club, even in a mopey, dickheaded adult form, are enjoyable characters and we as the audience are still holding on to the narrative threads of the first film. We want to see what happens with Bev and Bill, with Ben and Bev, with Eddie and Richie (the film fails Mike Hanlon as it does the first go around, slotting him into the space of exposition dumper and never really letting him out to do much more). Muschietti fills this enormous balloon of a movie with enough shocking imagery and moments of emotion that even when the film lags (and there is some toneless blather in the middle that should’ve ended up on the editing room floor) you still feel invested enough that you can ignore it just long enough until the film finds its path again.
One Last Thought:
Bev Marsh is wasted in this film. She’s the coolest character in the last one and here she’s a shell of a woman who finds her strength through a man’s love. Chastain is one of the great actors working today and here she’s reduced to whispers and “I’m scared” facial expressions. It’s a sad thing.
