Smile 2 could’ve very easily been called Scream if that title hadn’t already been used in a different horror franchise. The first Smile had a great marketing campaign behind it that would’ve made William Castle happy as people were featured in vantage points at sporting events holding a creepy smile.
And the movie was a nice change from the typical horror fare that is released by the likes of Jason Blum and his Blumhouse company. However, give Blum credit where credit is due and he knows how to keep a movie at a reasonable runtime. Smile is almost two hours long and it really needs to be only 90 minutes. Also, it contained a trope that many people hate nowadays where a character’s pet is only around to be killed. Movies like Prey and the latest A Quiet Place used animals as necessary characters critical to the plot more than just to die.
When the first Smile ended, it’s revealed that Joel (Kyle Gallner) has been possessed by the evil spirit. And just like the first movie, the opening is thrilling as Joel passes the entity on to some drug dealers. But things go wrong, because they always do when it involves drug dealers in movies, leading to the entity possessing a lowly drug pusher, Lewis Fregoli (Lukas Gage). And Joel is killed.
If audiences thought we might see how the entity affects Joel, well, no. Gallner is one of those actors Hollywood doesn’t know what to do with, which is why the plot movies totally to a new character. Yes, the cliched first movie lives up to the cliched tropes of horror movies just bringing in a new cache of characters who really don’t have much of a connection with the characters in the first movie.
No, we’re introduced to Skye Riley (Naomi Scott), who looks like a cross between Lady Gaga and Shailene Woodley during her Fault in our Stars phase. And she’s just about as irritating as that. Cheech Marin once commented that Hollywood is an incestuous industry and it’s no surprise that this movie and Trap were released less than three months apart and both feature a young pop singer in a huge role. Even Your Monster goes from a romcom/horror to a musical in its second half. Taylor And then there’s that sequence at the end of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice where everyone lip syncs to “MacArthur Park.” Swift is still riding high and basically dethroned Madonna as the “Queen of Pop.” And Wicked has almost made half a billion worldwide in just under a month, so the filmmakers are trying to tap in to the current trend.
So, Yes, Skye is a pop signer who has had a checkered history, ala Amy Winehouse but she looks more like Grimes in a flashback. Skye is trying to rebuild her career and life after she was involved in a car crash the year earlier that took the life of her actor boyfriend, Paul Hudson (Ray Nicholson, son of Jack). But Skye still suffers from pain issues from the crash. So, she sneaks away to buy Vicodin from her former school friend, Lewis. And of course, you can anticipate what happens next.
Parker Finn, who wrote and directs again, does have some good points with this movie. Skye is one of the biggest pop stars in the world. But she lives a very sheltered life. Her life seems to be micromanaged where she always expected to be here or there She is constantly under the eyes of her mother, Elizabeth (Rosemarie DeWitt), who is also her manager and gives off vibes of Jamie Spears and many other celebrity parents, as well as her assistant, Joshua (Miles Gutierrez-Riley), who seems to be the whipping boy.
Considering a lot of freaky stuff happen, Skye can’t get people to believe her because they think she might be using drugs again. (And there’s a disgusting scene where she sees some dude’s whitey-tighties on the floor with skidmarks.) When things get worse, she can’t cancel or postponed her tour because Elizabeth tells her she’ll face huge lawsuits. You hear so much about celebrities who are constantly pushed to work in show business as children and then when they became adults, people were still forcing them to do work they didn’t.
But the problem is Skye isn’t a very likeable person. And Scott, a former Disney child actress herself, plays her out of the Toni Collette Hereditary School of Acting where if you keep screaming, yelling and hollering, people will forget the plot doesn’t make much sense. But this sequel is well over two hours long, which means the same things get repeated over and over.
And of course, there’s the obligatory scene where Skye melts down at the worst time in front of a group of people at a special event and thinks she sees Paul, smiling. Finn says he hired Nicholson just because of his father’s famous evil look when he smiled in movies like The Shining.
As I’m writing this, I saw where Finn has reported he is currently working on a third movie to start filming in 2025. He might as well. People have bought the same premise twice, probably making him a millionaire. Considering how this movie ends, we’re going to follow another movie about another young woman screaming and yelling for three hours, as the movies are getting longer.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 