Overproduced and painfully scare-less

Rating: 4/10 (21 September 2019)

IT (2017) was in my opinion an okay movie. It did the book justice (for the most part) and was somewhat scary. What went wrong with IT is that it wasn't the jump scares so painfully obviously set up that was scary, it was the tension building up and the mystery unfolding.
IT Chapter 2 does basically the same thing wrong - but to a higher degree. Every other scene was a build up to a jump scare that just wasn't scary especially since you could predict it from a mile away. It seems to reuse the one aspect of the horror genre over and over again and every time it happens it becomes less scary and more comical. By the end of the film the girl next to me who at the start was hiding into her boyfriend was nonchalantly checking her phone and didn't even flinch for the most part.
Another thing that bothered me in this film was the sound. Goddamnit. Wallfisch's music is usually beautiful and don't get me wrong there was nothing wrong with the score but it really really was soiled by the sound mixing. The music was just too loud in the fight scenes apart from one scene in particular which was actually really good sound mixing (confusing, right?) using the absence of sound as building up tension. I wish they had used that technique more than a jump scare.
Some good aspects of the film was that the acting wasn't terrible. Chastain and McAvoy were great at taking their characters younger actors and channelling them through their performance. The rest of the loser club were okay. Bill Hader started off rough and it really felt overacted and it wasn't till the last few scenes where he really showed off some decent acting chops. As for the rest of them, they were forgettable but I think that's more the movies fault than the actors.
I did enjoy the CGI and Pennywise himself was terrifying. SkarsgÃ¥rd is a great actor and I'm not really that scared of clowns but god damn did he bring out a new phobia in me.
The book goes very deeply into psychology and the meaning of life etc and I'm glad the film didn't dive too deep into that as it was interesting in the book but translated to film it would have been waaay too much. I feel like the film wasn't serious enough to pose a huge psychological question and went for its feel-good ending instead.
Overall, if you watched the first film it's interesting to watch the second film maybe once but it just didn't really do much for me as a standalone film. I know that it's a sequel but it really just copied the first film but oh look! They're older! It didn't try incorporate original ideas or more adult themes at all.