The fact that Bill is constantly criticized in the movie for writing terrible endings to his stories is either a self-awareness the film has, or something incredibly ironic.

I was quite disappointed with the first It, that being the 2017 one. It had pretty good reviews, so I expected a lot more from it than I got. With Chapter Two, I knew that it had quite mixed reviews, especially compared to the first, so I definitely went into it with really low expectations. I never in a million years would have guessed that it would have been this terrible. It’s two hours and forty-nine minutes of nothingness that I will never get back, with very few redeeming qualities.

Since I have very few positive things to say about it, I’ll guess I’ll just start off with the positive. Keep in mind, these were almost like nitpicks, where I really actually had to try and find the positive stuff in this film (I thought it was that bad). The first thing I picked out was that I actually did kind of like the whole “gang getting back together again” stuff that happened at the very beginning. It was fun to see everyone again and see where they were in life. I think they also did a decent job casting them (for the most part). I don’t think James McAvoy, as good an actor as he is, was a good choice at all to play the adult version of Bill, though. There were also a few emotional and sweet moments that did hit with some impact. Not a ton, but a little bit. That’s it. That’s literally all I have to say about this movie that’s positive.

Almost from the start, It Chapter Two feels like an unnecessary sequel. I know they set up the first one to have a sequel, but it seemed so forced to me. Pennywise’s return feels so random and underwhelming, and the plans that the gang comes up with to stop him seem so out of nowhere and almost like they came from writer’s block. This isn’t the only time I got that “writer’s block” feeling in the film, either. I also absolutely hated what they did with Mike during the time in between the two movies. It felt like something completely out of a different movie, and was just plain odd.

Another huge negative about this movie was, where was Pennywise? He was hardly in the movie at all. I was honestly shocked by this. They kept him “behind the curtain” quite a bit in the first movie; he still showed up every now and then, and when he did, it felt set up. Here, he feels like he gets hardly any screen time at all, and when he does, it’s super random and cheaply thrown in there, almost like an afterthought or something that was forcibly written in. I really didn’t understand this at all. Isn’t Pennywise the big selling point of the movie?

It Chapter Two also just wasn’t scary whatsoever. The threat this time somehow feels even more minuscule than I thought it did in the first movie, and there was no sense of urgency at all throughout almost three hours. Pennywise barely shows up in the movie, and thus, barely does anything at all, so you don’t ever feel tension or that the characters need to hurry to get everything resolved. Instead, we get a bunch of, again, random “scary” scenes that don’t really play into the plot at all and heavily rely on jump scares and disturbing imagery. None of it was integrated into the actual story itself.

With it being almost three hours, I expected pretty slow pacing, but I didn’t expect it to just drag quite honestly the entire time. Within the first thirty minutes, I was ready for the movie to be over, and that feeling never went away. I think this plays into the lack of urgency because there was no plot momentum whatsoever. The characters split up not that far into the movie, and go on a bunch of random adventures that are part of the whole plan to take down Pennywise once and for all, and let me tell you, none of their little adventures were fun to watch at all.

I thought this film was solely focused on the gang as adults, so all of the flashback stuff kind of threw me off. I really wasn’t a fan of it. Every time there was a flashback, I was taken even more out of the movie because almost not a single flashback was necessary and/or added anything to the actual story or character development. Speaking of character development, another question I have is, why do half of these characters still act like children? It made no sense to me and made it very difficult for me to get invested in these characters, again, even more than the first movie, which I also thought did a poor job with character development. A lot of the crew is pretty much the same by the end of the film, too, making the unnecessary feeling of the entire movie even more prevalent.

With the cast being as good as it is, I have to say, I definitely wasn’t impressed by the acting. All of the performances, and I mean all of them (even James McAvoy and Jessica Chastain!), were so dull and uninspired. I thought all of the actors did a poor job of re-enacting their childhood counterparts, and I even had a hard time at first telling apart a few of the characters.

And then there is the main criticism that I already knew about going in - the ending. I had heard about the book’s ending being pretty bad, and so they changed it a little bit in the movie. I honestly can’t imagine the book’s ending being worse than the movie’s; it was that bad. All the stuff that was built up from the first movie and this one came to an extremely underwhelming and anticlimactic way. Everything about it screamed writer’s block and felt so unbelievably random that it was almost kind of laughable. I honestly don’t understand how it got approved for the script, I really don’t.

This might honestly be the most shocked I’ve ever been at a movie’s quality ever.