I am about to unload a dump truck of hate onto this movie. I also love this story. Both the novel and the 1990 miniseries had a major impact on me as a kid. I’ve read the book twice and still enjoy the 1990 version despite its flaws. I didn’t love Chapter 1 of this version, but I felt that the portrayal of the kids was endearing enough to make it marginally worthwhile despite the lackluster horror elements. But this goddamn thing is an abysmal failure on every level. It doesn’t work as a movie on its own merits, It doesn’t work as an adaptation, It just doesn’t fucking work.
I think we all know the gist of it at this point. Pennywise has returned from his slumber after 27 years and the kids from the first movie, now grown adults, must return to their hometown and face their childhood fears once more to finally kill Pennywise for good.
To be fair, the material with the adults is the weaker part of both King’s book and the 1990 movie. However, that gave me hope because there was legitimate room for improvement. But, as Morgan Freeman noted in a much better King adaptation, hope can be a dangerous thing. For starters, there is zero chemistry between these actors. That’s a goddamn shame because some of this casting seemed absolutely perfect when it was first announced. But there is just nothing here. I don’t see these people ever being friends, let alone being best friends that defeated a fucking demon together. That’s a big problem because much of the story is centered on the notion of loosing innocence as an adult and the strength of childhood friendships. I have always felt that the people you know growing up will always know you better than anyone that you meet as an adult because they know you stripped of all pretense. They know what you were before the world grabbed you and turned you into something else. That kind of sentiment is central to this story and it is dead upon arrival with the flat, borderline disinterested performances.
Even with stronger performances and chemistry, the movie is sunk by major structural issues. It didn’t occur to me while watching Chapter 1, but telling this story in (mostly) chronological order creates a major problem. The novel (and 1990 movie) begins with the adults and uses them to frame the story of the kids with flashbacks. So, in that structure, we get to know both versions of the characters concurrently. By telling the story in order, these feel like new characters. There is no emotional resonance to their reunion because it doesn’t feel like we know them. Will Beverly finally figure out that Ben is in love with her? Who gives a shit, these people just showed up and they don’t even seem to like each other very much. There just isn’t much of an emotional bridge between the two halves of the story. The movie also gets damn repetitive in the second act and basically is reduced to a series of vignettes of the characters confronting Pennywise. Again, this is a structural problem because, by telling the story in this order, they don’t have any other material to cut to as a way to break up the repetition.
However, as with Chapter 1, the biggest crime here is that the movie just isn’t scary. I covered this quite a bit in my review of the last one, but I hate this Pennywise. He is like the boring, over-anxious younger brother of Tim Curry’s Pennywise. But he is worse, oh so much worse, here because this movie has some of the most cringe-inducing, laughably terrible special effects that I have ever seen. Every goddam thing in this movie is computer-generated. Fucking everything and it looks like horseshit. I was honestly stunned by how bad this looks. Do you think a giant computer-generated Paul Bunyan statue is scary? Fuck no it isn’t. Every monster in this movie looks like it is straight out of a video game. The final version of Pennywise looks like the final boss in a Castlevania game. It is painfully, shockingly awful. And these people had the balls, the FUCKING BALLS, to include a homage to John Carpenter’s The Thing, which is a landmark in special effects. Fuck you, movie. You don’t deserve to lick John Carpenter’s balls after he runs a marathon in August while wearing a winter coat. Oh, and if any of this does actually scare you, don’t worry. The movie constantly insists on shitty comic relief to break up the tension. I don’t crack jokes while playing a Castlevania game, let alone having to fight a giant spider in real life.
Okay, now we are getting into SPOILERS because where this really pisses me off is as an adaptation. Look, It isn’t a perfect book. By his own admission, King was living on a steady diet of cocaine and booze in the 80s and nowhere was this more apparent. Some of the book isn’t filmable and I wasn’t expecting a giant cosmic turtle or a metaphysical battle of wills in another universe. But there is some shit I can’t forgive.
The ending of this movie. Fuck the ending of this movie. You know how they kill Pennywise in this? They insult him. That’s it. He’s one of the most powerful demons in the universe, an entity that has existed on earth for millions of years. But he will literally shrink and lose his power if you call him ugly because, as one of the characters puts it, “there is more than one way to make someone feel small.” I mean, fucking really? All these years and all these deaths and all somebody had to do was call him fat? Is this supposed to be some kind of message about bullying? Because if you are being bullied by someone much bigger than you, calling them ugly is a good way to get your ass kicked. Even so, you know what character this message would be more suitable for? The fucking bully character. I don’t know if I have ever been this stunned by the ending of a movie before. I mean….. I have no words. I just can’t comprehend how anyone thought this was a good idea.
There are a couple of other perplexing changes. Eddie is apparently gay now. Fine. It has zero impact on the narrative, so I guess it’s only there because its 2019 and we can’t envision seven characters without making one of them gay. Fine. I’m much less fine with the movie’s bullshit way of turning Stan into a hero for committing suicide. Before Stan kills himself, he apparently writes letters to the six friends explaining that he is too weak and he is doing the strongest thing that he can by eliminating himself. No, just no. Why the fuck are you going out of the way to change his suicide from an act of cowardice to an act of heroism? I don’t even know how to feel about that. It’s just a baffling change that exists for no reason. Also, when did he mail those letters? So, he gets the phone call, goes upstairs to take a bath, but before taking the bath he handwrites six letters, somehow finds the addresses of six people that he forgot existed, fucking mails them and then goes back to the bathroom to kill himself. How the fuck did he do all of this?
This thing is nearly 3 hours long and somehow manages to both drag and try to do too much. The narrative is a mess, the characters don’t work, it isn’t scary, the effects are godawful and it has possibly one of the worst endings in the history of motion pictures. This is coming from someone that wrote this review with a picture of Pennywise autographed by Tim Curry on the wall to my right: Fuck It.
Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_Chapter_Two#/media/File:ItChapterTwoTeaser.jpg
