Movie Review: Smile 2

It was another slow movie week so I ended up going to see Smile 2. I saw the first one which was mediocre but watchable, so I gave it a shot.
 
The first thing the movie lets you know is that it is a Parker Finn film. He wrote, directed, and produced it, and he doesn't want anyone to forget it. He's got some of the most obnoxious credit typography I've seen in years. So it's all his fault. If anyone hires him again, there'll be no excuse. Ostensibly he didn't do the casting because Naomi Scott is a strong performer.
 
To start with, it's simply a very boring story. We all know how Smile worked. It's like a play on Final Destination, the curse that keeps on giving. If you witness one of these demon-inhabited people kill themselves, then you're next--no exceptions. My point is that this isn't a movie about exploring the curse. That's what Smile was about. So how did they make Smile 2 interesting? They didn't. There was a fragment of a thread about a guy who thought he could sorta-kinda break the murder chain, but they never engaged with it.
 
The movie is pretty much nonstop on the main character, a pop idol named Riley Skye. Since this is the 21st century we can't have a protagonist who isn't piteous, so she's a recovering drug addict who lost her man in a car crash a year ago and suffered some serious injuries. No doubt that is supposed to wring some pathos from us. At the very end of the movie, we get to see that she grabbed the wheel from her boyfriend and wrecked the car herself. Yay, I like her less.
 
In fact, the entire movie is one long string of scenes that make Skye less and less likable. She starts out as a poor-little-rich-girl who lost her man and picked up a few scars, but by the end, she is a raging psycho bitch whose bitchiness has nothing to do with the demon. When her death came it was good riddance to bad rubbish for me. That's problem one: Skye is not ever a likable character.
 
Problem two is that the story is a milquetoast collection of banal scenes in which we have to watch Naomi's face react to yet another psychological onslaught. It's just boring. Oh, and she drinks water in nearly every scene. There's a line where she says that's what her therapist said to do when she wants to use, but they have her down an entire liter of water on camera nearly every damn time she's not moving. I'd call it bad writing, but the Voss product placement probably earned Finn Parker more money than the movie will make.
 
How many times can Skye wig out in her apartment in an interesting way? How about when she wigs out in her drug dealer's apartment? Or in her dressing room? Or in a hospital room? Or the dingy walk-in freezer of a boarded-up Pizza Hut? The movie is mostly Skye standing in a room wigging out. She's a decent looking woman, but it got old almost immediately.
 
That gets us to direction. Apparently, Parker Finn can't do an exterior shot without contaminating it with his idea of cool. So we have to suffer these long exterior shots that rotate through 360 degrees…because. We have to look confusingly straight down on Riley's NYC apartment building…because. No doubt he could explain some lame visual metaphor for psychic turbulence, but I certainly didn't enjoy it.
 
Worse, there are entire sequences that are disavowed. We get some crazy happenings with broken stuff and mess and chaos, and then, it didn't happen--it was all in her demon-infected head. Horror movies do that sometimes to great effect, but this movie did it so much that it eroded my trust in what was on screen. It became impossible to tell which bits of the narrative were real and which were fake. It's way too much of what is sometimes a good thing. It turns the watching experience into an abstraction. You can't react to anything because it's probably just another of Skye's fugues. For instance, she spends a lot of the movie interacting with her childhood friend who it turns out wasn't really there. These moves pollute so much of the narrative that the movie just becomes a completely ungrounded abstract collage of images--boring images mostly.
 
Putting it all together, we have a poorly shot boring script about an unlikable main character that doesn't explore the supernatural element whatsoever. She dies at the end. Big whup.
 
The upside is that writers like me can take heart that even heaping piles of shit get bought and produced, though if your material is properly awful, you might have to direct and produce the thing yourself as well.