Early reviews for IT Chapter Two have arrived. Two years after IT smashed expectations by earning strong reviews and grossing a massive $700 million at the global box office, the sequel is here to conclude the tale of the Losers Club and their battle with the murderous clown monster Pennywise (Bill Skarsgård). Where the first IT adapted the portions of Stephen King's original novel where the Losers are still young teenagers, IT Chapter Two follows the characters as adults as Pennywise finishes his twenty-seven year hibernation cycle, forcing them to return to Derry and stop him for good this time.
Jessica Chastain, James McAvoy, Bill Hader, and Isaiah Mustafa are among the actors portraying the grown-up Losers in IT Chapter Two, with IT director Andy Muschietti and writer Gary Dauberman once again working behind the camera. Early screening reactions were generally positive, as people praised the sequel's acting but also took issue with its pacing (due to the film's sizable runtime) and uneven attempts to weave together grounded storytelling with supernatural horror. Now, it's time for the professional critics to have their say.
You can read through spoiler-free excerpts from the IT Chapter Two early reviews below. For more, click on the corresponding links to check out the reviews in full.
Molly Freeman, Screen Rant
That's not to say IT Chapter Two will disappoint fans of King's book and of Muschietti's 2017 film. Altogether, the film delivers a satisfying second and concluding chapter to the story of the Losers Club - though it takes nearly three hours to do so. With sequences that lag even as they offer important character development, it's clear Muschietti needed all 169 minutes, but could have used them a little more efficiently.
Brandon Zachary, CBR
It: Chapter Two is exactly what you think it's going to be. Luckily, however, that's not necessarily a bad thing. The cast is strong, the script is engaging, and director Andy Muschietti delivers a solid story with plenty of scares. While it might not be as complex as other films in the genre, It: Chapter Two is, if nothing else, an entertaining watch.
Haleigh Foutch, Collider
Director Andy Muschietti returns for Chapter Two with a vision that is bigger and more ambitious in just about every way. The runtime is epic, the spectacle is more spectacular, the CGI is on full blast, the film bounces between timelines (meaning the cast is twice as big with both the adult and younger versions at play,) and the content is more mythological. The bold strides are admirable and some of them work like a charm, but often the massive scope makes Chapter Two feel too sprawling and, sometimes, disjointed and buckling under the weight of those ambitions.
Peter Debruge, Variety
... [IT Chapter Two is] an elaborate fun-house horror movie that springs pop-up gimmicks and boogie-boogie scares steadily enough to excuse its been-there story and self-important 169-minute running time.
Leah Greenblatt, EW
[The] main problem with Chapter Two is that it goes on, and on, for so very long. If brevity is not necessarily the soul of a good scare, it would certainly serve a story that sends in the clowns, and then lets them just stay there - leering and lurking and chewing through scene after scene - until the there’s nothing left to do but laugh, or leave.
William Bibbiani, Bloody-Disgusting
For all its flaws, It: Chapter Two is an exhilarating example of horror filmmakers getting all the free reign they could possibly want, from top-flight visual effects to a nearly three-hour running time to major stars to truly grotesque violence. The whole film is going damn near overboard, for better and worse. It’s easy to admire Muschietti’s film for its excess and imagination. It’s easy to watch and enjoy it as a fright flick. It’s just harder to connect with the adult versions of these characters than it should be, and it’s harder to take this story seriously than it was before.
John DeFore, THR
Why isn't It a prestige miniseries for some cable or streaming company? Andy Muschietti's two-part film clearly yearns for that format, not only in its patience-testing length... but in an episodic structure that frustrates those who expect certain kinds of dynamics in drama and suspense. Literally doubling the number of actors who played key roles in its predecessor, 2017's Chapter One, the film puts excellent thesps in the parts but winds up feeling much less satisfying.
Angie Han, Mashable
... Chapter Two feel curiously lightweight, almost more like a really long epilogue rather than a story in its own right. Still, there are worse ways for a beloved story to end than by assembling an all-star cast to give each main character some closure... If Chapter Two doesn't quite offer the thrill or emotional heft of its predecessor, it does serve up plenty to gasp at, laugh with, and even cry about - along with the satisfaction of closing the book on a long and winding saga.
Like the initial reactions, many of the early IT Chapter Two reviews note the movie's runtime (about 169 minutes) is a mixed blessing, in the sense that it allows the film to cram in a whole lot of world-building, character interactions, flashbacks, and horror sequences, but at the expense of a more streamlined, insightful, and otherwise effective narrative. Similarly, a number of critics take the sequel to task for essentially repeating the story structure from the first IT movie, albeit with the Losers as adults being tormented by Pennywise rather than kids. At the same time, a lot of the reviews acknowledge IT Chapter Two is pretty faithful to King's source material in these respects, and manages to cover an impressive amount of plot while still offering plenty of scary moments. So, in that regard, hardcore King fans may end up enjoying the IT sequel as much as the first movie (if not more).
Altogether, IT Chapter Two sounds like an ambitious, but messy followup to its predecessor that offers a (mostly) satisfying conclusion to the Losers Club's story. Even with more mixed reviews compared to the first movie, the IT sequel is still on-course to enjoy a massive debut at the box office this weekend, and should ultimately have the second-best September opening of all time behind, appropriately enough, the first IT. It's been about a month since there was an "event" film that audiences turned out for in large numbers (namely, Hobbs & Shaw), with most of this year's August releases generating modest returns at best. Fortunately, that makes now a perfect time for IT Chapter Two to hit the scene and usher in the fall movie season in style.
Source: Various (see the links above)
