I have only seen the first Conjuring, but I found this to be a pretty easy movie to get into even having not seen any of the other films. The story did feel like it was building up on previous films and previous happenings, but I didn’t have a hard time following along with it at all. I literally never watch movies out of order, but I was invited to watch this with a bunch of friends, so, you know how that is.

Overall, I didn’t really think it was very good, but it did have quite a few redeeming qualities about it that I really enjoyed. For one, everything with the Warren family I found to be very compelling, and I think if the story focused a little more on that, the movie would have been a lot better. The opening ten-to-fifteen minutes made for an extremely emotionally gripping introduction, and it set things up to come pretty well. Also, the actors they cast to play the younger Warrens were perfectly cast and they did an excellent job of making them look as much like their older selves as possible.

Judy, who is really the character with the main arc of the movie, even though I would say her parents are still the main characters, was well written for the most part. I liked everything with her boyfriend too, and I thought he was a pretty good new character to this franchise. He’s extremely honorable and a genuinely good guy that you root for. His dynamic with Judy’s dad was great too and honestly got pretty funny at certain times. The relationship development between her boyfriend, whose name is Tony by the way (probably should have already mentioned that), was one of the highlights of the entire movie.

Really though, I found this film quite underwhelming. My first problem with it was that for the first half, or maybe first two-thirds really (I wasn’t really keeping track of time), the pacing was really, really, weird. Not boring in any way at all, it was just how they cut between everything going on with the Warrens and the victim family that I found quite odd. It felt almost episodic, because there were long durations between cutting back and forth between them. I also thought the film did a fairly poor job of building up suspense for Warren’s eventual investigation into the case with the other family. Nothing ever felt connected or suspenseful building up to the investigation, which would be something really important to do in any horror movie. When it came to the Warrens, I for sure found their “episodic” sequences the far more interesting ones, mainly because of all the stuff with Judy, her boyfriend, and her parents that I mentioned previously.

I haven’t seen many horror movies, but to put it plainly, I just didn’t find this scary at all. It relied heavily on jump scares, which almost never get me, and they didn’t get me here. This movie was marketed as potentially the biggest and craziest case for the Warrens yet, but nothing with this new family, being the family victim to the demonic stuff, I thought was anything extraordinary or more serious than even the first movie. The case just never felt important enough because there wasn’t enough to make the family seem phased enough to fix it. And I must just get straight to it and be flat out honest, I was getting a chuckle out of more of this movie than I was a feeling tension or horror, but to be fair, I’ve always had a hard time getting scared with horror movies, at least the ones I’ve watched. I definitely need to see more.

When I said Judy was written well for the most part, I meant that there was definitely a compelling arc there, but unfortunately it never got the proper development or attention it needed. This led to a climax that honestly felt quite random and not built up well and was by far the most underwhelming part of the entire film. It sort of felt like just a bunch of random stuff was happening without much rhyme or reason. I know the third act/climax was done in a way that it was purely meant to just be intense and scary, but I just wasn’t really feeling it at all.

As a person of faith myself, I was also pretty underwhelmed. I thought the first movie did a great job of portraying faith in the direst of situations, which was my main positive with that film. Here, there wasn’t much of a faith aspect to it at all, which, with a demonic possession movie, is obviously important. Fortunately, there was a little bit thrown in there at both the very beginning and the very end, but that was really it. Maybe this had something to do with the director being different from the first movie, but like I said, I have yet to see the other films, so I don’t really know.

Also, just a quick note to finish things off: if you are going to see this movie in theaters, I would strongly advise against seeing it in IMAX, which I know sounds crazy, but the movie almost spoils itself whenever it switches to a bigger screen format. Every time it switched, I knew something big was going to happen which really took away the element of surprise for me.