It Chapter Two

Back after its surprise success two years ago, "It: Chapter Two" picks up the other half of Stephen King's megasized novel, looking largely at what happend to those seven kids from Derry and how they have to come together again to fight the strange evil that takes the form of Pennywise the Clown. And, as it was a surprise success and the sequel was not guaranteed the last time, some of the bits of adaptation that were skipped last time around kinda have to get squeezed into this movie instead (meaning we do get a fair few flashbacks for more of the kids), leading to a slightly bloated runtime and a fair chunk of doubling back.

I must admit I didn't mind that as much as I might have - I enjoyed the first "It" but probably only have the vaguest notion of what went on beyond the broadest outlines (seeing around 200 movies between these probably helps with the vagaries), and I didn't find it to be the mindblowing horror experience some did so much as a good kid adventure story with horror elements. The present day elements don't always work (about half of the adult versions actually have something interesting to do, and having each split up for introduction and for an individual scare sequence each means we do have to spend as much time with the more boring ones as with the interesting ones), but there's a couple of good new sequences here, some good meta-comedy here with writer Bill (James McAvoy) being constantly told "you need to come up with better endings" - up to and including that rare thing, an entertaining Stephen King Acting Cameo. Bill Hader and James Ransome tend to steal all the best moments between them (Jessica Chastiain is slightly sabotaged in that her most interesting scene was used for the trailer, and the rest of the film tends to just use her with the personality type "girl"), and the climax is a bit of a random runaround with a monster rather than something really interesting.

Yet somehow, I didn't hate this, and I didn't begrudge it the longish running time. If, yes, the prologue probably doesn't tie into the rest of hte story as much as it should (and while it was indeed something from the book, hell, most of the book has been rethought in line with a timeshift from the 80s to the 2010s, why not rethink and reframe this bit too), and in the end Pennywise is more a great concept for a monster than necessarily a great monster, it still works, dammit, as a bigscale horror adventure story - just, perhaps, not the genre redefining one that some hoped it might be.