.. but doctor, I am Pennywise.

Rating: 6/10 (13 September 2019)

I said in my review of Chapter one, that though I really liked that film, one of my concerns was that this was the easy half of the story to tell. Though I didn't like Chapter 2 as much, I did feel it mostly avoided the potential pitfalls and was an OK conclusion.
27 years after the children of Derry forced Pennywise (Bill Skarsgaard) into an early hibernation, Mikey (Isaiah Mustafa) the only one of the gang to have stayed in town, recalls his friends to honour the oath they swore, should Pennywise remerge. With the town in their past, their memories of their horrific battle have magically dissipated, but as they return, the recollections and the horror come back.
I feel like this might be another review where I say that a film was alright, and then just list a series of my problems with it. So I'll try and be clearer.... The film is fine. Perfectly acceptable. Performances are solid, the story is decent enough and some of the pitfalls of the more outlandish (or perhaps offworld-ish) areas of the plot are dealt with as well as they could be. It is, again, reasonably funny - in fact there are more laughs than screams.
That, perhaps, is one of the principle problems though. Again, it's not particularly scary, especially when Pennywise is inhabiting something else and not present in his clown form. There's a lot of CGI creations some of whom are more successful than others. Whilst on the subject of CGI, in some of the flashback scenes, they used software to make some of the young actors more closely resemble themselves from a few years back, this occasionally looks awful and gives poor Jeremy Ray Taylor in particular a plastic face. I don't feel like the adults had the same chemistry that the children had as a group either, despite the big names amongst them.
These failings, along with the lengthy running time, mean I'm probably not going to revisit "It" very often, but I do feel this is as strong a version of the story as you are every likely to get on screen.