It Chapter Two (2019) – Review

Don’t play with your food. If any advice were to be given to the murderous entity known as Pennywise the Dancing Clown, that would be it. It’s just not going to end well for the villain. This adaptation of Stephen King’s 1986 horror opus continues where the 2017 movie finished off, with the now much older versions of our heroes returning to Derry for their final showdown with It, and once again, director Andy Muschietti has assembled a stellar cast of actors for this big sprawling conclusion, (and I do mean big, clocking in at two hours and forty-nine minutes). This chapter is almost as long as the entirety of the two-part miniseries that aired back in the 90s.

Taking place twenty-seven years after the Losers’ Club last took on the evil creature known as Pennywise the Dancing Clown (Bill Skarsgård), we find that the old gang have long since gone their separate ways; Bill Denbrough (James McAvoy) is a successful author who has trouble with coming up with endings to his books that his readers like. Eddie Kaspbrak (James Ransone) works in the risk assessment business, while still trying to stifle his neuroses. Ben Hanscom (Jay Ryan) has lost weight and is now a fit and successful architect, Beverly Marsh (Jessica Chastain) is a fashion designer who has moved on from having an abusive father to having an abusive husband, Richie Tozier (Bill Hader) is a stand-up comedian, touring the nation with his acerbic wit, and then there is Stanley Uris (Andy Bean) living a quiet life with his wife, until he gets that fateful call from Mike. You see, Mike Hanlon (Isaiah Mustafa) has remained in Derry, Maine, and thus he is the only one who remembers their battle with Pennywise as well as their blood promise to return if it turns out that Pennywise wasn’t as dead as they’d all hoped he was.

“Here’s Clowny!”

Like the television mini-series, the key problem with It Chapter Two is that moments with the children are what makes this story work best and the stuff with the adults often tends to feel like so much filler, and one shouldn’t have filler in a movie that is almost three hours long. This is why Muschietti decided to fill as much of the run-time of chapter two with flashbacks of them as kids. It’s as if the director has to constantly remind us “Remember those kids, weren’t they wonderful?” Unfortunately, this leads to things being a tad jarring for whenever the movie flips back out of one of those flashbacks, and into the present, we are reminded how much more we preferred our time with those plucky kids. Now, don’t get me wrong, the adult cast does splendid work here, with James McAvoy, Jessica Chastain, and Bill Hader being particular standouts in this chapter, but sadly, nothing their characters do actually amounts to anything …well, aside from facing off against Pennywise at the end I guess.

“Should we try singing Kumbaya?”

Another key problem with It Chapter Two is there is no solid narrative structure as we had in the first film. This time out, we get the adults being sent on side quests to find “tokens” (personal items) that will be required if they are to win against Pennywise, so the story is continually derailed by our heroes splitting up to have these terrifying solo adventures, all of which are meaningless and have no bearing on the film’s conclusion. Which leads to the final failing of It Chapter Two: it’s not all that scary. We get Beverly fighting an old hag, Bill encountering Pennywise at the same sewer opening that took his little brother, Eddie is attacked by the old leper from the previous film, and Richie is menaced by the town’s giant Paul Bunyan statue, and though some of those sequences are quite effective (not the Paul Bunyon one), sadly, they’re not all that scary either — I don’t count jump scares — and much of that comes from the narrative point of view. A child being attacked by a leper is terrifying, but the same thing happening to an adult … well, not so much.

Can you buy an adult falling for this?

Setting all that negativity aside, I will say that the film is beautifully shot, the acting is universally great across the board — though some of the CGI to make the younger actors look the age they were back when they filmed Chapter One was a bit distracting — and Bill Skarsgård is still downright chilling as Pennywise the Dancing Clown, and if the film’s scares don’t quite live up to the previous entry, the visuals are still top-notch. I particularly loved the nod to John Carpenter’s The Thing “You’ve got be fucking kidding,” but sadly, the lack of tension throughout the film made this entry seem like a four hour film, not a three hour one, and that’s not a good thing.

On a final note, I will say that It Chapter Two was an even greater departure from the source material than the previous film, not that I expected to see a cosmic space turtle who vomited up the universe, but at three hours in length, it’s shocking how much they still left out — yet managed to put in an overlong cameo with author Stephen King — and the film’s conclusion felt more like something you’d have seen on an original episode of Star Trek, with Kirk and the away team mind-fucking with some supercomputer or all-powerful space entity. It Chapter Two is not a bad horror film, and there were some very effective moments, it just wasn’t all that scary and with its excessive length, it can seem like a bit of a chore to get through at times.

“Anyone feel like going for waffles?”