Horror missing from campy It Chapter Two

Jessica Chastain, Isaiah Mustafa, and Jay Ryan in It Chapter Two. Image courtesy Warner Bros.

It Chapter Two is a bad piece of horror. It fails at some fundamental elements of horror to the degree the supposed frights are laughable, because the filmmakers never find an adequate ambiance for their film. And somehow this is one of the least offensive aspects to It Chapter Two, which wanders into some troubled waters through either ineptitude or cruelty.

It Chapter Two picks up 27 years after the first film, with the return of the evil clown Pennywise (Bill Skarsgård) to the small, (apparently) redneck town of Derry, Maine. Losers Club member Mike (Isaiah Mustafa) recruits Bill (James McAvoy), Beverly (Jessica Chastain), Ben (Jay Ryan), Richie (an excellent Bill Hader), and Eddie (James Ransone) for one final battle against an ancient evil. Together, the Losers need to overcome bad memories, their worst fears, and the return of the crazed Henry Bowers (Teach Grant) to save the denizens of a small Maine town from a voracious clown.

The underlying issue with It Chapter Two is a lack of tonal consistency. The film veers all over the place throughout its nearly three hours, jumping from comedy to horror to oddity to melodrama and back and forth and forth and back. All of these tones form a campy goulash, a very silly little thing with barely a whiff of horror. The reliance of poor CGI adds to this overarching silliness, as it's difficult to take a monster seriously when it clearly doesn't exist in the same plane as the characters screaming at it. Ultimately it's unclear what director Andy Muschietti and writer Gary Dauberman want It Chapter Two to be. If they wanted horror they needed to set a stronger atmosphere and tone, or pump more out of the individual horrors the characters have to work through to survive. If they wanted to do parody a la Cabin in the Woods they need to have more to say about the genre they mock. What's left is bizarre, but in a way that indicates the creators are trying far too hard to be strange.

Viewers get a lot of this because It Chapter Two is long. It is very, very long, nearly three hours of plot to get through for an unsatisfying conclusion. Even with the extra time the film remains a mess with its character development, with the arcs for Ben, Beverly, Richie, and Mike incomplete or unsatisfying. It Chapter Two focuses mostly on Bill as he overcomes his guilt over his brother's death in film one. It's a nice story, but the film pads a couple of side adventures for Bill that hammer in a point already told effectively. By going all in on Bill the other stories lack comprehensive resolutions. It Chapter Two has some rather strange narrative choices it navigates through. A couple of kids are sacrificed to Pennywise because the main characters need to feel even more guilt for abandoning their responsibilities. Henry Bowers returns and engages in some stabbing shenanigans that ultimately don't add anything of note to the story. Other decisions are far more troublesome, like the use of magical Native Americans as a solution for killing Pennywise. This is both incredibly lazy storytelling and a regressive view of Native American culture.

Most of these can be chalked up to mediocre to bad filmmaking. What's really bothersome about It Chapter Two is Richie's arc. Richie is gay. The film insinuates this point throughout the course of its run time, alluding to deep secrets and a lost, unrequited love. Yet It Chapter Two never uses the word gay or queer or any non-pejorative to describe Richie. Richie never says the word aloud either, despite his narrative centering on self acceptance. This is very much bullshit. It takes a lot of courage to come out, courage which Richie shows through multiple battles with Pennywise. Coming out would be a near perfect conclusion to his story, but instead the filmmakers quietly allude to it again because they can't have a main character say “I am gay.” The only openly gay characters are beaten to near death before Pennywise shows up to take a chunk out of one of them. It Chapter Two literally opens with a hate crime, sprinkles in additional slurs throughout, but lacks the cajones to allow its one gay protagonist to come out. This is both lazy writing and cowardly, which fits a film without a clear vision of what it wants to be.

Review: One and a Half out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: R

Run time: 209 minutes

Genre: Horror

tl;dr

What Worked: Cast (especially Billy Hader), Humor

What Fell Short: Horror, Plot, Length, Tropes

What To Watch As Well: Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, Midsommar