Genre: Horror

Director: Andy Muschietti

Screenplay: Gary Dauberman, based on the novel by Stephen King

Cast: James McAvoy, Jessica Chastain, Bill Hader, Isaiah Mustafa, Jay Ryan, James Ransone, Andy Bean, Jaeden Martell, Wyatt Oleff, Jack Dylan Grazer, Finn Wolfhard, Sophia Lillis, Chosen Jacobs, Jeremy Ray Taylor, Bill Skarsgård

Running Length:  169 minutes

Synopsis: Twenty-seven years after the Losers Club defeated Pennywise, he has returned to terrorize the town of Derry once more.  Now adults, the Losers have long since gone their separate ways. However, kids are disappearing again, so Mike, the only one of the group to remain in their hometown, calls the others home.  Damaged by the experiences of their past, they must each conquer their deepest fears to destroy Pennywise once and for all…putting them directly in the path of the clown that has become deadlier than ever.

Review: It would never have been an easy task to adapt Stephen King’s gargantuan novel for the screen, and while the runaway success that was the first IT remake in 2017 ensured a second movie, this sequel faces an even tougher challenge – finagling the plot development and the totally off-the-rails denouement that King included in the novel, and doubling the actor count due to the need to cover both the child and adult iterations of the Losers’ Club. And if you thought the first installment was already running a little too long (which was my sentiment), Chapter Two ups the ante and tacks on another 30 plus minutes to make it an almost 3-hour affair. While it remains an engrossing watch, this is a movie where you will really feel the length of its running time.

Much of this is due to the fact that the narrative structure follows the first film, where each character is given an extended, solo sojourn, and is then compounded with the need to switch between two versions of each character in the Losers’ Club. While this is kind of necessary to set the stage for the eventual showdown, the film still feels way too sprawling and indulgent even if all of it remains very watchable (there wasn’t a suitable moment throughout for a toilet break). It does somewhat boggle the mind that Muschietti’s first cut was 4 hours long, because there’s really no way the material can live up to such extended running times.

The child actors remain uniformly good across the board, especially since they have already worked together on a previous movie. The adult cast, while boasting a number of recognizable faces, are more uneven in terms of performance. Interestingly, the most well-known actors – Jessica Chastain and James McAvoy – have quite unremarkable turns here, and both Bill Hader and James Ransone are actually the ones that give the most memorable performances amongst them.

Although both chapters of IT are of course positioned as horror films, there’s definitely much less terror to be found in the second film. Pennywise is no longer a mystery, and being faithful to King’s source novel here proves to be increasingly problematic, since the origins of the entity is so “out there” that quite a number of iterations of Pennywise stretch believability to breaking point. The copious usage of CG, especially in the latter parts of the film, also take away the organic creepiness that made Pennywise in the first film such an iconic scary character.

While there are very effective sequences, particularly in two scenes (unfortunately one is almost fully showcased in the film’s teaser trailer), the film never really comes across as being terrifying. The law of diminishing returns applies also to the individual sojourns again, and while effort had been made to make each encounter different, it also causes the overarching plot to essentially march in place until all the boxes are checked. With the total running time already clocking in at 5 hours, it’s good that IT Chapter Two firmly closes the door on the potential of another sequel, as a third film would surely be a detriment to the franchise. As it stands, while it’s definitely more bloated than needed, the two IT films represent one of the better Stephen King adaptations, though they are unlikely to stand the test of time as well as some of his best.

Rating: * * * (out of four stars)