The first chapter of It, released in 2017, ended with the adolescent Losers’ Club promising, should their victory over the film’s titular cosmic terror prove temporary, to come back and finish the job. Of course, such a return engagement would be inevitable, seeing as director Andy Muschietti and screenwriter Gary Dauberman left roughly half of Stephen King’s beloved epic doorstop unadapted. So what happens twenty-seven years later, when the now-adult Losers return to the haunted town of Derry, Maine, to once again do battle with Pennywise the Dancing Clown?
I didn’t expect the answer to be “hilarity ensues.” But It: Chapter Two places the comedic elements front and center. It’s not just a case of Saturday Night Live vet Bill Hader, playing pathological wisecracker RIchie, accidentally stealing scenes from heavyweights such as Jessica Chastain (as the tough, no-longer-tomboyish Beverly) and James McAvoy (Bill, now a beleaguered novelist). James Ransone provides his share of comic relief as the grown-up Eddie (no less hypochondriacal than he was as a child), and even McAvoy gets in a camp-laden rant in a memorable scene with a kid on a skateboard. Is this entirely a bad thing, though?
Well, probably, considering it consistently undercuts most attempts Dauberman and Muschietti might make to scare or disturb. With a few exceptions — most notably an early hate crime against a gay couple and a later encounter between Pennywise and a little girl with a facial birthmark — most of Chapter Two’s set-pieces are more likely to elicit amusement than fright. In the case of Hader and Ransone’s encounter with a certain Pomeranian, that’s clearly intentional. Ditto Bill’s encounter with a pawnshop proprietor played by a certain Stephen Edwin King. But one of Ransone’s earlier scenes, where he confronts his childhood demons in a pharmacy basement, probably wasn’t meant to come off as quite so funny.
Most of the film’s comedy comes from the filmmakers’ attempt to condense the source material (one of King’s longest and densest novels) into something that can be portrayed visually. The screenplay preserves the spine of the modern-day half of the novel’s narrative — the adult Losers are introduced, reunited, split apart, and finally reunite again to fight the final battle — while replacing the actual plot beats. Infidelity to King isn’t the problem here, as much of the novel’s action is either internal or metaphysical, and wouldn’t translate well to cinema. (That scene in the book — you know the one I’m talking about — at least makes thematic sense, even if to say it doesn’t work is an understatement.)
But the new beats and concepts (and there are a lot of them; Chapter Two has a runtime just short of three hours) often run the gamut from ridiculous to the profoundly stupid. Both book and film center on a ritual the Losers must enact to overcome It. King portrays it as a largely intuitive battle of wills with its own internal logic; the film transforms it into a silly pile of faux-Native American hogwash, with a scavenger hunt bolted on to facilitate the series of quest subplots that make up the second act. Everything culminates in a climax and denouement so bad that some observers have wondered if it’s intended as a meta-commentary on King’s own reputation as a writer of terrible endings.
I’m tempted to say that Chastain, McAvoy, Hader, and friends deserve better. (In fact they do. Chapter Two underserves the character of Mike as much as Chapter One did, and also conceives the grown-up version of Ben as some sort of sentient wallpaper.) But to be honest, the ensemble’s total commitment to the material makes the film entertaining even when it’s not particularly good. The kids are back, as well, appearing in flashbacks, recreating that easy camaraderie that was one of the first film’s highlights. Meanwhile, Bill Skarsgård, whom Chapter One afforded very little opportunity to actually, y’know, act, gets a lot more to do here than dance a janky jig or lend his visage to a dodgy CGI effect. And some of the film’s most memorable moments belong to him.
Still, it can’t be denied that, qualitatively, It: Chapter Two is, to say the least, highly uneven. As a narrative, it’s (to quote Douglas Adams) a crazy piece of near-junk. As a cinematic experience — well, your mileage may vary, but it’s been a while since I laughed so hard at a movie. I’m not entirely certain that’s what the filmmakers intended, but I’ll take an ambitious failure over a successful mediocrity any day.
Starring Jessica Chastain, James McAvoy, Bill Hader, Isaiah Mustafa, Jay Ryan, James Ransone, Andy Bean, Bill Skarsgård, Jaeden Martell, Wyatt Oleff, Jack Dylan Grazer, Finn Wolfhard, Sophia Lillis, Chosen Jacobs, Jeremy Ray Taylor. Directed by Andy Muschietti. 169 minutes.
