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

'Winter's War' battles against a lack of necessity

Chris Hemsworth and Jessica Chastain star in "The Huntsman: Winter's War." Image courtesy Universal Pictures.

If you squint hard enough you can almost see the charms hidden within “The Huntsman: Winter's War.” It's more often than not light and goofy, rarely laden with that dour weight plaguing the first “Huntsman” film and seemingly happy to drift away into sub-mediocrity. It's a perfectly forgettable film that neither strains brain cells nor the viewer's patience, lasting only a few minutes longer than it ought to but still well short of interminable like, say, another recent blockbuster film featuring rodents and capes.

Any true enjoyment of “The Huntsman” – a title that is technically a misnomer – is rooted in how much one enjoys watching star and titular outdoorsman Chris Hemsworth in action. He's about as close as current cinema has to a galoot; a large, amiable enough fella who works his way through films with a smile and an admirable torso while sporting a horrendous accent that flitters away when he forgets his character has it. To be fair, employing an accent in the first place is silly enough for a movie based on a Teutonic fairy tale existing in what narrator Liam Neeson acknowledges is a fantastical world. Why the filmmakers decided to have native Californian Jessica Chastain adopt a brogue while South African Charlize Theron has nary an accent will never receive a proper answer. And at least Emily Blunt retains her natural speech patterns for once. But back to Hemsworth, an attractive actor who grits his way through a role that never quite works for him. He's never quite robotic or stiff, yet he lacks a certain lightness of being too him to be too charming, as if he's trying a little too hard to be funny to compensate for his physical excellence. Still, there's something inherently sweet about Hemsworth, whose physicality is never bulky enough to be threatening and whose persona is never too serious or self important. He's workmanlike, never strong enough to boost a film but rarely a true detriment to the final product either, the kind of leading man who could be interesting as a character actor down the line once the good looks begin to fade a little.

Hemsworth is fine, as is Chastain, as is Theron in a much weaker role than the evil queen presented in the first film, and as is Blunt as a woebegone ice queen/little sister to Theron's wicked Ravenna. Slightly less fine is everything around them, essentially a movie that never really knows where it's going or what it wants to do with itself. It starts off as a prequel to “The Huntsman,” depicting the origins of Blunt's frosty queen and her hatred of love and how Hemsworth became the eponymous character, or at least one of them along with Chastain and a whole host of child soldiers. Then it segues into a sequel, mostly eliding over the presence of Snow White (and, of course, Kristen Stewart) but still bringing back one of the seven dwarfs (Nick Frost) and eventually adding three more (Rob Brydon, Sheridan Smith and Alexandra Roach), leading to a net negative of three dwarfs. Goblins and faeries are tossed in as well for reasons that may or may not be related to the plot from “The Lord of the Rings” because the writers couldn't come up with a plot of their own.

“Winter’s War” perhaps might have worked as either a prequel or a sequel; combining both is sloppy and requires the frequent insertion of a rather bored Neeson to keep track of what’s happening. This is a very mismatched film, dependent on miscommunication to advance the story. A nice spot of tea would resolve most of the character’s problems, our at least hash out the idea that villains aren’t to be trusted.

And yet “Winter's War” could be much, much worse than it is. The tone is either amiable or solidly campy, especially whenever Theron pops up and excessively emotes and snarls at Blunt and Hemsworth. It's almost disappointing to say this film isn't quite a trainwreck – a complete disaster is a joy on its own – but it doesn't induce bile either, and it'll assume its fate of fading into the nether regions of the memory bank until the commercials for the DVD come out in about four months. At the least, it's not going to disappoint audiences hoping for something resembling greatness from what is slowly morphing into a film franchise; expecting an ant hill and finding a molehill instead has its benefits.

Review: Two out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: PG-13

Run time: 114 minutes

Genre: Action

Ask Away

Target audience: People who like Chris Hemsworth as a leading man.

Take the whole family?: Some of the content is a little more shocking than expected, so follow the ratings recommendation.

Theater or Netflix?: Stay at home and stream it if you want to see it.

Does anything disappoint in this film?: The only thing that serves as a proper letdown is what happens to Charlize Theron's Ravenna. She's a complex figure in the first film, tragic and somewhat pitiable given her background and her ambitions. All of the nuance is lost this time though, and the movie even goes out of its way to make her even more sinister because of one truly vile act she technically commits before the start of “The Huntsman.”

Watch this instead?: This one's definitely a blast from the past, but “Ladyhawke” is a pretty fun little knight story with an interesting premise and a very young Michelle Pfeiffer. You could hit up the recent works of the three leading ladies: “Mad Max: Fury Road,” “Sicario” and “Crimson Peak.”