IT: CHAPTER TWO

WE ALL SPOIL DOWN HERE

Well, it's a disappointment. There's no two ways around it: It: Chapter Two isn't anywhere near as good as the first half and for all the visual horror unleashed at the screen - ghosts, gribbley monsters - for its hundred and sixty nine minutes (take the afternoon off or put the babysitter on overtime), it's surprising just how insufficiently scary it is, to the extent that even the simple Boo! moments didn't raise very much of a response. In terms of getting to grips with the plot it's worth rewatching the earlier instalment, because a lot of the new film directly references those events, both in flashbacks and new footage with the younger cast. However, the downside of this is that it reminds you how good It was, and how much of a comedown Chapter Two is.

Twenty seven years later, Pennywise (Bill Skarsgard) resurfaces in Derry, Maine and the Losers Club are called back to confront him/It again as they'd vowed to do in blood. Now middle-aged and  variously successful, but still troubled and traumatised by those childhood events, they have to perform an ancient ritual to banish the evil forever, as well as facing down the buried horrors and fears of the past. And essentially that's it: instead of bickering, squabbling kids they're bickering, squabbling adults dancing those same steps again, revisiting their earlier terrors which Pennywise is using against them.

So everyone gets a segment in which they go to their old homes, their old school, their old childhood haunts and hideaways, and Pennywise magicks up a monstrous hallucination to terrify them. And this gets repetitive: Jessica Chastain's Beverly goes back to her childhood home and the woman living there now invites her in - but then turns into a monster and then it turns out the building was long abandoned anyway. Jay Ryan's Ben goes back to the school where he was the bullied fat kid and gets chased round the empty corridors. James Ransome's Eddie goes back to the pharmacy and finds his obese, grotesque mother in the basement. Bill Hader's annoying nonstop comedian Richie goes back to the local videogame arcade... and so on.

Chapter One focussed on those characters as children and back then they were a likeable enough bunch, but in their adult incarnations they're a lot less interesting and I found myself not really caring what happened to them and not being scared for them when the bad stuff started happening. To be honest the TV version did it better and in two hours less. It's interesting that the two most horrifying scenes in the movie are a vicious homophobic assault right at the start and a scene of nasty domestic violence, and Pennywise is central to neither of them. The first, which came as a surprise as I didn't remember it from the Tim Curry miniseries (I'm assuming it's in the book, which I haven't read), arguably harks forward to a character reveal later on, though I didn't spot any suggestions of it in a preparatory rewatch of Chapter One. The second is in the miniseries (and echoes Beverly's hideous relationship with her creepy-as-hell father) but it still felt out of place and crueller and more sadistic than anything Pennywise does: Both of these are things which are real and genuine and people suffer from them every day of their lives, and they're more horrific and unsettling than any number of clearly unreal spider monsters, rotting corpses or howling ghosts conjured up by a demonic dancing clown.

I didn't hate Chapter Two, but I didn't like it nearly as much as the first one. Bits of it are very well done and the spider monster is particularly horrible (though it leads to a Thing reference that didn't need to be there), but other parts dragged terribly and I left the cinema glad that it was over. I genuinely felt it needed a massive edit: there is no way that this needs to be two and three quarter hours long, whatever the intentions of fidelity to the book might have been. I wish I'd liked it more (obviously) but in the end it didn't really deliver and it didn't fulfil the promise of the first one.

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