It Chapter Two

With It Chapter Two, we have a needed, yet pretty bad, conclusion to a saga started with a previous, far superior film. If you saw and liked the first movie, you have to watch this one to get the full story. You’ll also witness a decline in quality. In a strange way, I’m happy it exists, because it does have some good scares and Bill Hader rocks the house as a grown-up Finn Wolfhard. It closes out the Stephen King story in, admittedly, much better fashion than that spider sequence in the TV miniseries. If you look at It as one long movie consisting of two chapters, the overall “two-movie” experience is still cool. If you look at this sequel as a standalone, well, it’s a bit of a mess. Actually, it’s a big mess—an editing room fatality. The first movie focused on the Losers Club as children, concluding with them seemingly defeating Pennywise the Clown (an always frightening Bill Skarsgard). This one picks up 27 years later, welcoming the likes of Hader (Ritchie), Jessica Chastain (Beverly) and James McAvoy (Bill) to the proceedings. When evil seems to revisit their hometown, the adult Losers return for a rematch with the morphing clown. That’s it for the plot. The adults split up, suffer some individual horrors at the hands of Pennywise, then wind up back together for the finale. A big, central problem in this movie is that the kids from the first film, who actually play a large part in this one, have grown mightily since the first chapter wrapped. While there have been some nice advancements in digital de-aging, this film is not a boasting component of that movement.