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

It misses the mark for horror

Bill Skarsgard as Pennywise in It. Image courtesy Warner Bros.

For a fair portion of the opening sequence of It director Andy Muschietti locks in on the little fears of childhood. The creepy basement with little lighting, the empty streets, the things that lurk in the sewers. The sequence is a little disturbing, at least until the nefarious evil spirit Pennywise chomps a child’s arm off before dragging him off into the sewer. The build up falls asunder once the poorly rendered violence is shown on screen, and the movie never regains the opening sense of dread.

The quality of the horror in It depends greatly on how the eponymous supernatural being is employed and the performance of the actor in the role. As a creature that manifests itself in the form of a clown, Pennywise is a monster who has a need to torment his victims before consuming their souls and flesh. There's a lot of Freddy Krueger in Pennywise – using fear as a means of justifying their existence – although the clown has a bit more playfulness in his cruelty than Freddy, a friendliness to the menace that can put a child at ease for a moment or two. This Pennywise, played by Bill Skarsgard, is missing that puckishness and hints of misleading kindness. His malevolent intentions are never hidden underneath a facade of joy; he’s simply evil, which is a bit dull for a creature that spends so much time messing with the minds of children. Skarsgard tries too hard to be the scary manifestation of a clown without making the audience feel uncomfortable around him. Nothing offsets the attempts at terror, most of which are ineffective anyway, to offer a balance between general clown behavior and embodiment of humanity's fears.

While Skarsgard doesn't play up the character's designed hamminess, the movie provides few opportunities to allow the character to be creepy either, showing several of his nastier acts instead of implying the pain Pennywise inflicts. Once Pennywise bites that child’s arm off the audience effectively loses the possibilities of the potential horrors. All of the awful things Pennywise could and would do to a child, is negated by showing exactly what he'll do. Horror by implication can be much more effective than horror depicted on screen, especially for a movie with lackluster CGI like It.

A lot of the problems with this movie can be pinned on the atrocious script. It can be painful to watch because of random tonal shifts – a blood cleaning montage comes to mind – that undermine the horror atmosphere. Some of the decisions made are baffling, including repeated scenes in which the kids just keep running off on their own despite clear evidence doing so is a very, very bad idea. Horror has some lenience when it comes to the idiot plot – scary situations can justify some moronic behaviors – but It crosses the line between realistic stupidity and cinematic stupidity egregiously. A couple of choices make it seem as if the writers felt some sense of fealty to the original novel’s writer Stephen King, including padding out the run time to push what should be a sub two-hour movie into a two-and-a-quarter-hour slog. There’s also the less than stellar choice to have the most interesting character, Sophia Lillis' Beverly Marsh, be the victim of incest, get kidnapped by Pennywise, and put under a spell to eventually get the Sleeping Beauty treatment/get sexually assaulted.

Lillis though is pretty great as Beverly, as are the rest of the child actors (Jaeden Lieberher, Jeremy Ray Taylor, Finn Wolfhard, Chosen Jacobs, Jack Dylan Grazer, and Wyatt Oleff) that form the circle of friends fighting against Pennywise. Their interactions in the moments between supernatural attacks are fun and engaging, reflecting the awkward period between childhood and the early teen years. Even their obnoxious moments are realistic and pretty funny thanks to Wolfhard's delivery and the retorts volleyed back by Oleff. As a coming of age story It could be pretty good with this cast and better writing.

The ultimate failures in horror though serve as the ultimate let down for It. The scenes with the kids being kids build the bond they have and establish those characters as likable and at least worth rooting for. But there’s still the need for terror, to put those kids into situations beyond their control. Even with an immortal creature that dresses like a clown and eats children, It misses the mark so much viewers won’t have to keep the lights on to go to sleep at night.

Review: Two out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: R

Run time: 135 Minutes

Genre: Horror

Ask Away

Target audience: Stephen King acolytes and viewers who aren't completely averse to clowns.

Take the whole family?: Considering a kid gets his arm bitten off by a clown, and the presence of more than one clown, stick close to the rating.

Theater or Netflix?: This one might play better at home in the dark without an audience mocking it.

What do you think of clowns?: I'm pretty horrified by them. The idea of the artificial smile obscuring true emotions bothers me on many levels, as does the overly friendly behavior and the buffoonish antics. The scariest part of the entire film was the reminder that a man dressed as a clown was just four rows behind me the entire time, at least as far as I knew.

Watch this instead?: The first half of the 1990 miniseries It is at least OK, highlighted by Tim Curry's insanely effective turn as Pennywise. The newer version shares a lot with a show that hits hard on the 1980s vibe and horror, Stranger Things.

Dark Tower falls apart

Idris Elba in The Dark Tower. Image courtesy Columbia Pictures.

The Dark Tower teases with hints of how great it could, or rather should, be. The Stephen King adaptation has several fascinating magical bits and a typically great, understated lead performance by Idris Elba as weary gunslinger Roland Deschain that it could very well serve as the start of a great fantasy series on par with the Lord of the Ring. But it doesn't come particularly close to reaching those heights, stuck with just those glimmers of quality in an otherwise dire screenplay that lifts elements from, of all movies, Super Mario Bros. courtesy a brain trust led by the inconsistent Akiva Goldsman. What viewers get is a mishmash of concepts and tones, with a story carried by the wrong character and few positives from an abbreviated movie.

At the heart of Dark Tower is a simple good versus evil story between the troubled, tired fighter Deschain and giddy, evil wizard Walter (a wicked hammy Matthew McConaughey). Enough parallels exist to make the two mirror images of the other, the gunslinger's shooting prowess canceling out the sorcerer's epic magic abilities, who seeks some sense of revenge by taunting poor Deschain. Traces of that concept carry the film to as close to watchable as it can get, along with the hints about Walter's true powers and the skosh of mythology about the eponymous tower, the gunslinger legend, and the creatures that serve Walter's orders to destroy the sole boundary keeping the dark from cascading into the light.

Somehow most of that is sidelined to focus on some preteen kid (Tom Taylor) discover his psychic powers, or in King’s terms shine. With so many great options to choose from involving a brilliant gunfighter and a wizard, Goldsman and crew opted to center The Dark Tower on the adolescent coming of age story in which his powers (poorly) represent some sort of awakening. They effectively made an escort mission where Deschain grumpily but still lovingly protects the kid from the evils around him. That the movie doesn't leave enough time for their relationship to grow (let alone enough time to believe how quickly the boy's powers increase) exacerbates the problem. It's not the worst route this movie could have veered toward with its narrative; it just ranks pretty low on the list for what is or is not interesting with a story about a mystical gun fighter.

It's just frustrating watching Dark Tower and waiting for director Nikolaj Arcel and multitude of screenwriters to build some sort of a universe. There are a lot of little elements that crop up hinting at what could have been, some cool little bits of magic performed by an almost unstoppable being, and the general concept of Deschain's gunslinger legacy. What this movie needs more than anything is a well-plotted mythology to explain the movie's machinations and provide viewers some context as to what's happening. The battle between Elba's Deschain and an appropriately enthused McConaughey would make for a remarkable movie, with Elba's quiet intensity contrasting greatly with McConaughey's slightly menacing charisma. Dark Tower offers little aside from formulaic snippets of exposition and a ton of logical leaps the viewer has to make to fill in the gaps otherwise. Little explanation is offered for the existence of the movie's multiple worlds, the eponymous tower, or even the war between the gunslingers and McConaughey's dark wizard Walter. Viewership of what sounds like on paper to be an incredible experience is instead abbreviated to post-battle flashbacks (proper battle sequences are a little too pricy for this movie) and some mediocre world jumping that skimp on the special effects. Some of that would get built upon through the addition of some hypothetical sequels, but Dark Tower leaves viewers wanting far more from the movie they've watched.

Then again, building a world as elaborate as the one required for Dark Tower is difficult for a movie that lasts all of 95 minutes (end credits included). Ninety-five minutes is not long enough to establish a universe appropriate for this movie. Goldsman and company attempt to fill in the gaps with exposition and a whole lot of assumptions, leading to the aforementioned mythological holes and some rather notable plot holes to boot. Cutting corners has its consequences, in this case a less than engaging film and what is probably an early end to what should have been a great franchise.

Review: One and a half out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: PG-13

Run time: 95 minutes

Genre: Fantasy

Ask Away

Target audience: People who have read the book series and folks down to watch Idris Elba be awesome.

Take the whole family?: The content is too dark for young kids. Keep it at age 10 and up.

Theater or Netflix?: Netflix if at all.

Should this franchise continue?: Ideally this would be rebooted immediately, with only Elba carried over to whatever comes next. It's easy to appreciate what this movie could have been even without reading the books, so perhaps a new round of talent can maximize this movie's potential.

Watch this instead?: Stephen King adaptations are pretty hit or miss. The Shining, The Dead Zone, The Shawshank Redemption, Carrie and Stand By Me are all pretty great, due in part to the respective directors taking liberties with the material. Also worth a read is The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon