It Chapter Two
IT CHAPTER TWO - Warner Bros Entertainment
Two years on from Andy Muschietti's box office hit adapting only the first half of Stephen King's infamously elongated horror novel finally arrives the long-anticipated second instalment. Picking up twenty-seven years later, the characters of Beverly (Jessica Chastain), Bill (James McAvoy), Richie (Bill Hader), Eddie (James Ransone), Ben (Jay Ryan), and Stanley (Andy Bean) have grown up, moved out of town and long forgotten the terror of Pennywise (Bill Skarsgård) in the sleepy town of Derry, Maine.
The only member of the Losers Club to stay behind is Mike (Isaiah Mustafa), who for the last three decades has been researching this monstrous evil. However, the town is slowly starting to build up a body count once again, forcing Mike to get in touch with his childhood friends and convince them to return to a place they have long forgotten and defeat this evil once and for all.
At two hours and fifty minutes, the running time of Andy Muschietti's film is a monster in itself. The source material of Stephen King's book is infamously bloated, and to combat such Muschietti has added as much as possible in the likes of character development and connective tissue to the previous instalment. On paper, it looks like a battle in its own right, but Muschietti just about manages to keep this epic afloat - no pun intended - with decent pacing and engaging performances from the terrific cast list.
Nobody particularly stands out compared to the performances of the child cast in It: Chapter One. Nothing is in the same realm of charisma as Finn Wolfhard's Ritchie or Jack Dylan Grazer's Eddie, but most especially the inner turmoil and terror inhabited by Sophia Lillis as Beverly. The respective performances in their adult years by Bill Hader, James Ransone and Jessica Chastain are crafted to a profound level of engagement, but the intrigue, horror and torment are not here for the audience to fully connect with when compared to the film's predecessor.
It is ironically the same issue director Tommy Lee Wallace found in his three-hour miniseries of the same name in 1990. The first part, like Muschietti's film, follows the younger cast before following up with the adults, but ultimately suffered the same issues of finding compelling material to craft a group of adults who also held the same manner of charisma and friendship found between them.
The adult version of the cast holds the same energy and intensity brought to their respective characters as their younger stars did, with the material heightened and much more layered for the actors to run with and develop. However, charisma and camaraderie are slightly lacking this time around. There is not a strong enough connection due to the material that has been written regarding the group of characters reacting or interacting with each other for the audience to find organic or convincing.
More damning is It: Chapter Two is only twenty-five minutes shorter than the entire 1990 miniseries from Tommy Lee Wallace and still cannot quite crack what works and what does not. Muschietti attempts to craft this film as an entry for newcomers as well as serve as a direct sequel for returning audiences. He tries to connect the two films with integral subplots, and contextually it works to add depth but more so feels like an excuse to bring brack the much-adored younger cast. However, bringing the younger stars back comes with a slight catch.
Two years passed, and those twelve-year-old actors have now turned into fourteen-year-olds actors, and the age difference is not an easy exploit to cheat. What It: Chapter Two has done is digitally de-age these characters, and while visually the results are more so on the positive side with only a few issues of skin textures, it is the ADR (Automated Dialog Replacement) and dubbing that is almost a complete disaster. Jeremy Ray Taylor as Ben Hanscom gets the brunt of this with dialogue that is not even correctly synched up to the correct frame rate. Jack Dylan Grazer is another victim here with his voice now wholly different from what it was in the previous instalment, so different it does not feel like the same performance.
Another issue is one that did not necessarily drown Muschietti's previous instalment but did dampen the experience overall: the usage of CGI. Granted, there is a sporadic usage of practical effects that look great, but they are infrequent and often repeated from what the audience has seen in the first chapter. The heavy usage of CGI implemented here sadly drowns and sanitises all the visual horror present. Therefore when it is implemented, the viewer is left with this hollow and cheap sense of the impact that is far too overly exercised.
Muschietti has thrown everything imaginable at this second and final chapter not only to honour the source material but to give the audience the ending they have ironically been waiting for with the last twenty-seven years since the flat finale of the 1990 miniseries. Sadly with that, Muschietti over indulgences and tries to almost craft a prequel-sequel identity for his film that sinks with the sheer amount of weight it has to carry, forgetting the intimacy and detail of character and wanting to explore the spectacle that lands somewhere in the realm of underwhelming.
It Chapter Two is released worldwide on September 6th 2019
