A big letdown. Boring, generic, riddled with jump scares.

Rating: 6/10 (18 September 2019)

The first movie was okay, good even, thanks to the excellent cast.
The second one not so much. Again, the cast is excellent and they do their absolute best to make the viewing experience somewhat bearable.
The biggest problem for me was the pacing. While I loved the first part of the movie, where the old gang gets together again. The dynamic is very good and I felt real chemistry between the members. After that, it just gets stupid and downright boring and at times, painful to watch.
The plot is silly. Which is a funny thing to say since this is a Stephen King fantasy. But still, some of the plot lines make zero sense. Obviously I'm not going to talk about them, since this is a spoiler free review. Lets just say that the middle part of the movie consists of a lot of rinse and repeat scenes with tons of unnecessary and boring jump scare scenes.
Jump scares. I don't know what happened with the creators. The first movie was scarce with jump scares, which is fine. I think the best jump scare movies are the ones with no jump scares. Get it? Jump scaring audience is an extremely cheap way to get a reaction. The problem is, after a successful jump scare, you're adrenaline leaves your body and you become indifferent about what happens next. Granted, I could see every jump scare from mile away and wasn't surprised even once. It's just a cheap cheap way nowadays. I would even label it as lazy film making.
The pacing. We're either going full throttle or standing still. There's rarely any build up. And the rare build ups usually end in a jump scare. The movie feels like it's almost 3 hours long and that's never a good thing. When your main characters are constantly in trouble but saved due to plot armor, you lose interest and never really feel the characters are in any real danger. That's a no no, especially with such an excellent cast.
The plot is silly. Well it's obviously silly by default when you have a human eating clown in the mix. But none of the plot lines in this one made any sense. I'd love to talk about them in detail but that would mean spoilers and even longer rants when I'm attacking individual scenes.
Overall, a big disappointment. I don't quite frankly know what this movie even is. Is it a horror? Not really. Is it a comedy? Not really. Is an action movie? Not really. It's just a hot mess.