I liked It (2017) a lot. It was a ton of fun and super creepy in all the right ways. The adaptation did the book justice while making the necessary tweaks to make it a bit more modern and ditch the ultra awkward bits.

So coming into Chapter Two, I was looking forward to it. The movie focuses almost entirely on the Losers Club as adults, 27 years after their encounter with Pennywise. Mike is the only one of the seven kids to stay in their hometown of Derry and he keeps the Club’s pact when he discovers that Pennywise is killing again. Mike calls his olds friends to come back to stop the slaughter.

It, the novel, is massive. It’s a good 1,000 pages so splitting it up for a movie is the right thing to do. Breaking it apart as the kid timeline and the adult timeline is the easiest way of taming this twisted story. But watching this second half felt way too familiar, like it didn’t quite justify it’s existence. It’s just more of the same, just with an older and taller cast. It’s a really weird thought because hey, isn’t that what sequels are? You keep going with what was done before. Keep what was good, move away from what didn’t and add to the world.

I never got the sense that Chapter Two found its purpose. For a movie that exceeds two and a half hours, it’s way too simple. Not much happens. The first chunk is getting everyone back together, Mike telling the gang he knows how to kill Pennywise. That leads into the second act where each person gets their “totem” to break Pennywise’s power (I guess) so the monster can be killed. The third act is obviously going after Pennywise. And that’s it. You find out what each kid did with their lives, but you don’t get to know anyone any better. The dynamic was much more interesting in the first because it’s a group of kids, all in different family circumstances, coming together to first figure out what’s going on and sticking together to do something about it. There’s way more comradery in the first and each beat with Pennywise feels new and fresh.

Plus, everything with Henry Bowers feels like an afterthought, tacked on simply because he lived through the first movie (if I remember right, Pennywise gets him as a kid in the book). He’s added as another threat which the story doesn’t need and he’s in maybe all of five minutes, so why bother? If those scenes were cut out, no one would notice or miss him. If the goal was to give Eddie more motivation for the end, there are better ways of doing it.

The big problem is that Pennywise is too familiar here. As monsters go, he’s super goofy (which I do like but it needs to be carefully managed–let’s be real, you can only prance so much), he lives to scare and then eat someone. There’s a lot of jubilation in how he hunts, stirring up fear to make him more powerful. So while he looks menacing as ever in Chapter Two, the actions are all rather predictable. It feels like too much of the same. Much like prancing, there’s a limit to how many times you can run at someone before it turns into a bit. Maybe not enough people get munched? It is rather dull to hang this on a low body count, but it would give a better perspective on how truly dangerous this entity is. Despite grandiose special effects, the scale comes off as small. Through the whole movie, only the Losers Club knows Pennywise is doing anything. The undercurrent of a threat isn’t realized well enough.

And what is with the weird reactions from the few bystanders that are in the movie? When the Losers Club first meets at the restaurant, Pennywise lets them know he knows they’re back with some hallucinations. It turns into a full scale freak out with six adults screaming in terror and Mike smashing the table with his chair. The hostess comes over and nonchalantly asks them if everything is okay. It’s like she noticed one of them looking around for a waiter instead of the entire corner of the resturaunt rioting.

On the production side, this movie is a knock out. The cast is terrific and the visuals are nuts. The special effects are fantastic with some really creative and well realized nightmare-ish scenarios. The one thing I did come away from Chapter Two is please give director Andy Muschietti a Nightmare on Elm Street movie! That’s all I could think about from the moment Pennywise came back on screen. The powers they show Pennywise doing fit Freddy perfectly and show how badly handled he’s been in his last three movies*. Muschietti knows how set up scenes and shoot for heavy special effects work. With the right script, he could bring the Nightmare franchise back.

*Wes Craven’s New Nightmare is really good, I was just disappointed with the very few death nightmares. Freddy vs Jason, Freddy was robbed in the body count. Jason kills everyone, I think they only did two nightmare sequences. The NOES remake (2010) wasted almost every opportunity to be creative. You can do anything in a nightmare which separates the Nightmare franchise from the rest and it’s been ages since someone ran with it. Tina’s death scene has been done three times. /rant