YEAR OF RELEASE: 2019
GENRE: THRILLER/MYSTERY
RUN TIME: 2h 50m
Defeated by members of the Loser’s Club, the evil clown Pennywise returns 27 years later to terrorize the town of Derry, Maine, once again. Now adults, the childhood friends have long since gone their separate ways. But when people start disappearing, Mike Hanlon calls the others home for one final stand. Damaged by scars from the past, the united Losers must conquer their deepest fears to destroy the shape-shifting Pennywise --- now more powerful than ever.
The cast is terrific. James McAvoy, Jessica Chastain, Bill Hader, Jay Ryan, James Ransone, Isaiah Mustafa and Andy Bean play the grown-up versions of the Losers. They all suit their characters very well. The movie does a pretty good job in syncing the childhood and grown-up versions of each character. You can feel they are the same people you met in the first movie and don’t feel like strangers to the audience. The bonding and charisma between the characters is easily one of the strongest positives of the movie. Bill Skarsgard, who plays the role of ‘It’, is absolutely fantastic to say the least.
The movie definitely has some problems, first and foremost being that it is not as scary as the first movie. One of the disadvantages of grown-up characters is that it significantly reduces the scare factor in the movie. The idea of a freaky clown hunting down kids is automatically scarier than hunting their adult versions. CGI-heavy monsters were another aspect that took some of the scare away for me. In the movie, when Beverly goes to visit her old apartment and she finds an old lady there, that could have been a pretty scary scene. The tension was built really well, you could get an idea something was wrong from the very beginning. But then came a weird looking CGI freak which completely killed the scene for me.
The second biggest problem with the movie is that it is way too long at 2h 50m, especially for a horror/thriller. And that inevitably means inclusion of unnecessary scenes. There were many such scenes, one being where Bill finds his old bike in a store which he then buys and rides it for way too long.
One of the strongest driving forces in the first movie was an emotional underlining. Whether that be the dynamic between Bill and his brother who fell victim to Pennywise, or Beverly’s dis-functional household where her father held her responsible for her mother’s death. This movie misses that emotional depth which goes a long way in rooting for the characters.
The characters are what keeps you interested in this movie. Its scary but not as scary as the first one, its good but not as good as the first one. The movie would be considered better if the first movie didn’t exist but since it does, comparison is inevitable. And that’s a problem for It Chapter Two.
SCORE: 5.5/10
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