IT: Chapter Two

'IT: Chapter Two' is the hugely anticipated sequel to 2017’s ‘It’. The first movie proved to be a criticaland commercial success which saw the self-named ‘Losers Club’ endure the summer from hell asthey were haunted and terrorised by the evil entity which lurks through the fictional town of Derry,Maine. The sequel takes place 27 years later in modern day, which sees the ‘Losers Club’ as adults,with the return of Pennywise played by Bill Skarsgård and the original cast of young actors to playtheir original roles in flashbacks.So, to be blunt; this movie is extremely disappointing. It was my most anticipated movie of the year.As soon as the credits rolled at the end of my first viewing of the first movie, I was counting downthe days until I got to see the sequel. I now wish I hadn’t spent so much time looking forward to it.For a horror movie, it is severely lacking in genuine scares. The first movie was not tremendouslyscary, but it countered that by bringing a sense of creepiness and dread to the movie. The sequel hasnothing to counter the lack of scares. The scariest thing about the movie is the run time, coming in atjust under 3 hours.For a movie of this length, not a whole lot happens. It jumps from scene to scene, which areultimately the same thing. We see an adult ‘Loser’ by themselves, we get a flashback to them astheir younger selves, Pennywise appears to scare them in some form or another, we snap back totheir adult selves and then poxy Pennywise rocks up again to give them an aul shpook. Rinse andrepeat. It just got so repetitive. I realise that was pretty much the same structure in the first movie,but at least in that movie we only had to sit through one scare per character, this time we have to sitthrough two scares for most characters and it comes across mostly as filler. Filler. In a 3-hour movie.As mentioned previously, it’s not all that scary. It relies on cheap jump scares, which more oftenthan not come across unintentionally as funny rather than scary. I honestly heard more laughs thanscreams in the screening I was in. Like most jump scares, they are all so predictable. I could tellexactly when a ‘scary’ part was going to happen right before it did. All it would entail is one of the‘Losers’ would be looking somewhere, they turn away, they turn back and suddenly there’s a‘monster’ there accompanied by a loud, ‘scary’ sound. These ‘monsters’ bring me on to my nextpoint nicely.The CGI in this movie is abysmal. For a movie with a multimillion-dollar budget, you think theywould’ve spent a bit of that on decent special effects. I’ve seen better visual effects on PlayStation 2games from the late 90’s. Utterly, utterly laughable. As myself and my friends were discussing afterthe movie (shout out to Jack and Glenn), if you’re laughing at the things that are supposed to bemaking you crap your pants, you’ve gone wrong somewhere along the line.A few positive words for this movie, the actors’ performances for the most part are superb. Ipersonally really enjoyed the performances of Bill Hader (adult Richie), Isaiah Mustafa (adult Mike)and James Ransone (adult Eddie). I thought that the three of them were the best thing about thismovie. Hader and Ransone really captured the essence of their characters previously played by theyounger actors in the first movie. Mustafa playing Mike had the difficult role of providing insight andexplanation to the returning ‘Losers’ who have all left Derry in the years since the first movie andhave since forgotten what happened. Mike never left Derry, so Mike never forgot what happened inthe summer of ’89. Hollywood powerhouses James McAvoy and Jessica Chastain weren’t given awhole lot to do and I thought the movie wasted the abilities of two actors of their calibre. Skarsgårdas Pennywise was good, but I thought the material he had to work with was boarder line garbage.The film simply did not use him enough for my liking, instead opting for crappy CG ‘monsters’.All in all, ‘It: Chapter Two’ was a hugely disappointing follow up to one of my personal favouritemovies of this decade. They should’ve left it at the one movie. But we know how much studios lovemoney. If this movie makes anywhere near the amount of money the first movie made, we couldvery well be seeing ‘It: Chapter Three’ sometime soon… and that is the scariest thing about thismovie.