PREMISE
Global pop star Sky Riley begins experiencing increasingly terrifying and explicable events. She’s forced to face her past as these events escalate everything surrounding her life.
THE GOOD STUFF
NAOMI SCOTT – There’s a big difference between what is referred to as a scream queen and just a good actress in a horror movie. Scream Queens encompass all the traditional things that have defined scream Queens over time (sex appeal, loud screaming, girl next door type of image). Scream Queens are tropes put to the screen to be preyed upon and run away from things. Every now and again, however, you’ll get one of these American horror films that will feature an actress giving as much effort as possible to make a real character out of the bull**** the script has given them. That is certainly the case with this movie.
Naomi Scott is VERY good. She is an actress who deserves a lot more than what she’s gotten so far in terms of prominent studio film roles. She is trying so hard to make this character into something that makes sense and is quite admirable. This is so much more of a physical role than what these scream Queens even tend to do. And on top of all that, she sings quite a bit in this film, and it’s actually good! Who would have thought?
THE BAD STUFF
THE JUMP SCARE RATIO- SMILE 2 is classified as a psychological supernatural film. By that classification, you can set up your horror scenes as creatively as you want. Because everything is going on in the character’s head (in a way), you can set up the spooky s*** any way you want and not have it conflict with the story. You can pull the wool over the audience’s eyes as often as you like and have it completely justified if the story is creative enough to do so.
The frustrating thing with SMILE 2 is this 50/50 split between creatively creepy scenes and good old-fashioned cheap as f*** day-old McDonald’s cheeseburger jumpscares. Even in the scenes where the cheap jumpscares were justified based on the hallucinations that the main character is having, it’s still so uncreative in its execution that you can call the jumpscare from a mile away.
THE UGLY STUFF
HORROR MOVIE WORLD RULES – I don’t know if it’s openly acknowledged, but horror franchises make their own rules of the world that their franchises embody. There are always specific criteria of the world that tell the audience how a supernatural antagonist is supposed to be killed, certain traits that it has, how it kills others, or when it appears, etc etc. (examples: Freddy Krueger and dreams, saying Candy Man’s name three times, monsters from A QUIET PLACE being blind) the franchises that have lasted the test of time in this genre established rules in the FIRST CHAPTER of their franchise and built a world around those rules so that when certain characters came across them, they could figure them out and have a decent shot of confronting the antagonist (Outside of FRIDAY THE 13th and ALIEN, which told us that those particular antagonists were pretty much impossible to kill).
The bad movie franchises make s* up as they go along. They established rules in the first film, yes, but then (as they do in this franchise) they make s* up as they go along without building a world around or justifying the change of any of the rules that have already been set. Just because the story’s protagonist is going insane should not mean that you can add new abilities to your antagonist on the fly without explaining how the f*** it’s possible.
(Boy, I hope I’m making sense because I’m not trying to spoil this thing for anybody)
The third act of this movie requires a whiteboard, some post-it notes, and a diagram of the timeline of the events in the film written down to piece it together to make sense because The Entity has two more f abilities that it didn’t have in the first movie. Somebody’s actually going to make the necessary 15-minute YouTube video explaining the chronology of this movie. Bless your heart, whoever you are.
WORLD BUILDING – The director of this film, Parker Finn, kept the ending to that first movie ambiguous. Yet, he wanted to keep the backstory of the entity secret from the audience for future franchise installments. Fair enough. That’s his right, and we’ve seen it before. We don’t know where the Xenomorphs or the creatures from A QUIET PLACE came from per se.
Unfortunately, this doesn’t seem like a franchise that wants to do any world-building. And there was the main problem that I have with American horror films. Why not serialize these franchises that you know are going to make money? It’s the reason why A QUIET PLACE has become a flat-out tent pole franchise and why the main complaint of the prequel A QUIET PLACE: DAY 1 is that it didn’t tie into anything that came before. People want that. They want a long-term investment, don’t they?
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SMILE 2 is my breaking point. I hate Halloween. I’m happy for the little kids who get to get candy, put on costumes, and go trick-or-treating. I’m happy for the clubgoers who get to put on promiscuous versions of traditional costumes and go to House parties and clubs. Good for them. Good for all of you.
As a cinema-goer, I have to say this is the garbage part of the year for me. If I’m not getting aggressively trash horror films (like everything in the TERRIFIER series), then I’m getting films like this that have all the potential in the world to be a cut above the copious amounts of trash American horror films that are released throughout the year, and just barely squeak by as good enough.
SMILE 2 is in theatres now.
