IT CHAPTER TWO Review Roundup

Two years after director Andy Muschietti broke box office records with the big screen adaptation of Stephen King’s IT, he’s taking fans back to Derry, Maine to finish the story with IT CHAPTER TWO this weekend. The film version of the story was split into two distinct sections, and this sequel follows the characters as adults, 27 years after the first installment.

The big question on the minds of fans leading into the weekend remains, does CHAPTER TWO hold up to the standard of the first movie? Well, the embargo on the film’s reviews has finally been lifted and the critics are speaking out. How do they feel about the movie?

There are quite a few complaints about the three hour runtime of the film, and some who argue that the entire movie is a bit clunky. Then again, plenty of others are glowing about Muschietti’s follow-up.

Here’s what the critics have to say:

Brandon Davis – ComicBook.com

“Every thread leads to a third act culminating a near three-hour movie with some spectacle that’s hard to stay too invested in or get scared by when you might find yourself checking your watch. The final moments are clouded with CGI and flashing lights which, for some, might come with scares while, for others, it ends up losing a bit of the terror.

“Fortunately, a surprising amount of heart is added to the finale, and the overall experience with the follow-up warrants the price of admission. Certain story points should have been expanded upon rather than others being scattered across the second act but director Andy Muschietti and company have crafted something fans of the first will get a kick out of, even if they aren’t as enamored with It as they were in 2017.”

You can read our full review here.

Meg Downey – GameSpot

“In terms of scares, Chapter 2 delivers about 60% of the time. Bill Skarsgard has returned to reprise the role of Pennywise the clown, and he’s just as uncanny and unsettling as he was the first time around. He even manages to stay as menacing and as threatening scaring a bunch of 40-year-olds as he did terrorizing a bunch of pre-teens–so that’s certainly an achievement. However, for every genuinely amazing scare Chapter 2 has to offer, there are two more marred by awkward CGI or predictable jumps.”

You can read GameSpot’s full review here.

Jennifer Bisset – CNET

“While It Chapter 2 brings their story to a conclusive and largely satisfying end, it disappointingly walks right into the same trap as many sequels. Bloated with story ideas, characters and, most noticeably, running time — not to mention excessive CGI — Chapter 2 is at times harder to hang on to than an escaping balloon.”

You can read CNET’s full review here.

K. Austin Collins – Vanity Fair

“There’s a running joke in Chapter Two about a writer who’s bad at endings. A brief cameo from Stephen King makes it all but impossible to miss that this is a joke about King himself—or at least the King who wrote It, creating a world so magisterially personal and strange that his less-compelling supernatural fixings had nowhere to go but toward a giant spider living out a half-baked ancient myth in a sewer. Is that why Chapter Two‘s numbing finale, in which the film finally wears out its welcome, is such a deadening rehash of stuff we’ve seen before? There’s nowhere else to go: history repeats itself, the film tells us. So does trauma. And so, apparently, do movies.”

You can read Vanity Fair’s full review here.

Dorian Parks – Geeks of Color

“I might love the first movie a little bit more, but I still thoroughly enjoyed this movie as a whole. Andy Muschietti did a great job of not only staying faithful to the source material, but also adding fresh spins and ideas to this adaptation of a Stephen King classic. If you’re a fan of the first movie (like me), you’ll love this sequel.”

You can read Geeks of Color’s full review here.

Leah Greenblatt – EW

“More than once in It: Chapter Two, someone onscreen mutters ‘you gotta be f—in’ kidding me.’ It’s hard, from the cheap seats, not to start to agree; the film spends so much of its two-hour-and-45-minute runtime shoving scares down the audience’s collective throat that they eventually crossed over to the other side (at least at this particular New York screening) and start giggling at the sheer bogey-man lunacy of it all.”

You can read EW’s full review here.

William Bibbiani – Bloody Disgusting

“If you’re looking to scream and spill popcorn, It: Chapter Two might very well be the horrifying rollercoaster you’ve always wanted. But if you’re looking for a worthy follow-up to the previous It, a film with satisfying drama amidst all the bloodletting, you might be in for a little disappointment. Andy Muschietti’s film is entertaining and full of shocking scares but it doesn’t make nearly as much of an emotional impact as the first half. I guess bonkers mythologizing, a flashback structure that shortchanges every character, and jokes that defuse way too much of the tension can do that sometimes.”

You can read Bloody Disgusting’s full review here.

Peter Debruge – Variety

“How many pages does it take for seven kids to defeat a killer clown? And how many hours does that translate to when adapting the story to screen? For fans of Stephen King, the answer always seems to be ‘never enough.’ The pop pulp shiver-giver inspires in readers a kind of ravenous insatiability that has thwarted his false-alarm retirement and felled more trees than the fires blazing in the Amazon rainforest. That same appetite helped feed the excitement for director Andy Muschietti’s ‘It’ — a monster hit two years ago, earning more than $700 million — and ought to bring audiences back in even greater numbers for ‘It: Chapter Two,’ an elaborate fun-house horror movie that springs pop-up gimmicks and boogie-boogie scares steadily enough to excuse its been-there story and self-important 169-minute running time.”

You can read Variety’s full review here.