It Chapter Two: Two much of a good thing

It Chapter Two (2019) • View trailer 
3.5 stars. Rated R, for dramatic intensity, profanity, highly disturbing violent content and gore
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 9.6.19

This impressively creepy chiller delivers a relentless 100 minutes of gruesome, appalling, terrifying, look-between-your-fingers heart-stoppers.

Having made their way into the heart of Evil's lair, our heroes — from left, Bev (Jessica
Chastain), Mike (Isaiah Mustafa) and Ben (Jay Ryan) — are confronted by yet another
in an endless wave of ookie-spooky monstrosities.

Director Andy Muschietti and scripter Gary Dauberman leave no horror movie cliché neglected — no phobia unexploited — in their handsomely mounted, atmosphere-drenched conclusion to Stephen King’s 1986 best-seller.

Unfortunately, this film runs 169 minutes.

It doesn’t matter whether we’re discussing chocolate milk shakes or cinematic shocks; indulge too much, and the result simply becomes bland.

Which is ironic, because the best part of 2017’s It was the clever way in which Muschietti and his writers — Dauberman was assisted that time by Chase Palmer and Cary Fukunaga — stripped away the over-written dead flesh of King’s 1,138-page exercise in diminishing returns. With this second “half” of King’s saga, they’ve succumbed to the same self-indulgent excess.

Quite a pity. Particularly since the first two acts are — no question — macabre and terrifying at every turn.

Doesn’t matter what irrationally frightens or repulses you; Muschietti and Dauberman tap into it. Spiders? Claustrophobia? Disgusting flying bugs? Long, dark hallways? Slithery, worm-like nasties? Naked old people?

Clowns?

Clowns with massive, jaw-stretching, needle-sharp teeth? (The better to eat you with, my dear…)

There’s actually much to admire in this grim fantasy’s concluding installment, starting with an ensemble of well-cast actors who persuasively feel like grown-up versions of the first film’s adolescent heroes. Dauberman also manages the clever feat of integrating this sequel with its predecessor’s events, while simultaneously making it a coherent stand-alone experience for anybody unfamiliar with that 2017 entry. (Likely no more than one or two of you, but still…)

Based on surface evidence, it would seem that those kids — who defiantly owned their local reputation as “Losers” — have blossomed as adults, with lives and careers as far as possible from their home town of Derry.

Bill Denbrough (James McAvoy) has become a best-selling horror author and screenwriter; he has outgrown his stutter, but still feels responsible for the long-ago death of his younger brother. Richie Tozier (Bill Hader) is a popular stand-up comic whose fondness for vulgar humor obscures a carefully concealed secret. The fastidious Stanley Uris (Andy Bean) is an accountant: absolutely the right profession for somebody with obsessive/compulsive disorder.

Eddie Kaspbrak (James Ransone) is a New York-based senior risk assessor; he no longer needs the asthma inhaler that was only a placebo anyway. Ben Hanscom (Jay Ryan), having outgrown his boyhood chubbiness, runs a commercial architecture firm. Beverly Marsh (Jessica Chastain) co-owns a women’s fashion line with her husband; alas, she has traded an emotionally abusive father for a physically abusive spouse.

They all therefore have deeply rooted psychological triggers capable of sending them back to impressionable, petrified childhood: the weakness exploited by Pennywise, who (literally) feeds on fear.

Only Mike Hanlon (Isaiah Mustafa) has remained in Derry, where he works as a librarian and lives in the clock tower above the main floor’s lengthy shelves of books. He’s therefore on hand to witness a fresh uptick of ghastly atrocities that primarily — but not exclusively — concern the dismemberment of children.

Mike knows: Twenty-seven years later, “It” has returned. He immediately summons his childhood friends, who converge on Derry in varying degrees of confusion; time and distance have blanketed their memories to a weirdly mysterious degree.

But it doesn’t take long for fresh nightmares to bring them up to speed.

For a time, Muschietti and editor Jason Ballantine keep things moving rapidly enough to conceal the core plot’s tendency to make stuff up as it goes along. It — whether King’s novel, or either of these two big-screen adaptations — definitely suffers from the cliché of a monster whose powers and abilities wax and wane, depending on circumstances. That’s tolerable in the first two acts, when we get a sense that the evil clown (Bill Skarsgård, as Pennywise) is toying with its human adversaries, much the way a cat tortures a mouse before killing it.

But once we hit the final, butt-numbing hour, this arbitrary disposition becomes ridiculous. And tedious.

Not that said third act is the sole blunder. Muschietti and Dauberman open with a repugnant and unforgivably brutal incident of gay-bashing, during a prologue that has absolutely nothing to do with what follows, but seems inserted solely as a political comment on the sub-human cruelty of homophobes.

On the positive side…

McAvoy, Chastain and Hader easily dominate the adult cast; the latter turns gallows humor into an art form. Indeed, this film is laden with darkly comic moments, which effectively balance the grue during those initial 100 minutes. Much of the fun comes from the wild-eyed Hader’s facility for one-liners, but the horror maestro himself — none other than Stephen King — also has a delightfully mordant cameo as the owner of a dilapidated antique shop.

A lady-or-the-tiger set of doors, much later, also is a droll sight gag.

McAvoy is our surrogate: the (mostly) rational character in charge of explaining stuff, and functioning as the group’s influential heart and conscience. Bill’s long-buried grief is sharper than his friends’ various traumas; McAvoy’s angst is palpable.

Bill also wages an unspoken war with Ben over Bev’s affections. Back in the day, Bill got the girl, but Ben loved her more; this unrequited passion continues to make him miserable. The worst part: Neither Bill nor Bev has the slightest awareness of their friend’s silent, long-carried torch.

Chastain has a tough assignment, because Bev was “touched” by It back in the day, and therefore has a spooky prescience the others lack. At the same time, she’s a former battered daughter and current battered wife; Chastain deftly navigates these complexities, over time becoming more at ease with the friends who were — and still are — her support system. 

Then, too, she’s a plucky fighter who refuses to be defined by her flaws: the perfect adult representation of the younger self played with such mocking challenge by Sophia Lillis.

We spend plenty of welcome time with Lillis and the other childhood selves. Now following the template of King’s novel, Muschietti and Dauberman cross-cut between current events and what-happened-immediately-thereafter incidents that affected the kids, later that same awful summer. Jeremy Ray Taylor is heartbreaking as the oft-tormented Ben, never brave enough to admire Bev from anything but afar.

Finn Wolfhard — doing double duty in this series and television’s Stranger Things — and Jack Dylan Grazer veer just this side of obnoxious, as young Richie and Eddie, but it makes sense; acting out masks nervous tension and adrenaline-fueled terror.

Teach Grant has a bewildering supporting role as the gleefully maniacal Henry Bowers, the Renfield to Pennywise’ Dracula: a former school bully turned murderer, who is magically freed from his mental institution when the present-day nightmare begins. But his activities here seem superfluous — why would Pennywise need him? — and his apparent “powers” are even more random than those of his mentor.

Paul D. Austerberry’s production design is terrific, particularly with respect to Mike’s library and clock tower home, and the creepy old mansion that sits atop Pennywise’s underground chambers of horrors. Benjamin Wallfisch’s score relies heavily on stingers and jolting blasts of synth, which amplify the smash-cuts that Muschietti and Ballantine employ to such relentless effect.

Until it all becomes tiresome. We greet the conclusion (finally!) more out of relief than satisfaction, after being beaten into submission: the shocks no longer shocking, the CGI enhancements no longer bloodcurdling. Flensed of at least half an hour — more like 40 minutes — this film would be a terrific follow-up to its predecessor.

But we’re stuck with this version. More’s the pity.