‘Smile 2’ Review: An Intense Naomi Scott Takes On Sequel To 2022 Horror Hit That Just Feels Like More Of The Same
Whenever you have an original breakout hit in the horror genre it generally means you can expect at least about eight sequels cashing in on the concept. The latest to spawn a hoped-for franchise is writer-director Finn Parker’s follow-up to his smash 2022 debut feature Smile (which made $200 million globally), which he promises is “bigger, bolder, more off the rails, nastier and bloodier” and 10 times the impact of the first film. That may be, but Smile 2, at a bloated running time of 2 hours and 7 minutes, is basically just following the template of the original, which dealt with a metaphysical being inhabiting its victims in the form of a human with a haunting smile on their face, actually a curse passed on from one possessed individual to the next.
In Smile the key protagonist was a psychiatrist, Dr. Rose Cotter, played gamely by Sosi Bacon who in her quest to help her patients becomes traumatized by this entity and spends most of the film trying to convince people she is just not batsh*t crazy, that her visions and horrifying situation is not just a psychological problem but rather the real deal. In taking this idea on to a second film, Finn has not reinvented the wheel but instead just put a new driver in charge.
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That would be global pop star Skye Riley (Naomi Scott), a person already freaked out from the effects of a devastating car crash a year earlier that also killed her actor-boyfriend Paul Hunter (Ray Nicholson), and sent her on a downward spiral of self-immolation (she rips chunks of her hair out whenever the pressure is too intense) and drug addiction. Now she is taking on a new tour at the urging of her mother/manager Elizabeth (Rosemarie DeWitt), but the fame game will be much different this time around. A fan event where she signs autographs and takes selfies with her devoted flock is an early indication that the smile brigade is on her trail, especially a little girl who has it bad. It all really gets frightening in her visit to old school classmate and now drug dealer Lewis (Lukas Gage), who looks and acts whacked out. Skye soon will see the results of one of the smile-possessed as he takes his heavy barbell and gruesomely smashes his face to bits right in front of her.
The actual connection between the two films is an opening sequence immediately after the Paramount Pictures logo appears. Joel (returning actor Kyle Gallner), who was trying to help Rose get rid of her curse, instead inherits it himself at the end of Smile and now is desperately trying to pay it forward as it were. Unfortunately, after a shootout, he is run over by a speeding car in the grossest of ways. This scene must be one that made Parker refer to the sequel as “bloodier.” Lewis now becomes the connection for Skye’s ascension as latest victim of this otherworldly presence. With a few violent intervals that provide lots of work for the makeup and prosthetics team responsible for coming up with stomach-churning ways to die, this film, like the first, is mostly a focused psychological dive deep into Skye’s ever intensifying personal descent into hell with one vision after another driving her to the edge. Somehow this rapid decline doesn’t make much of an impression on her friends and family, who just wonder what the hell is wrong with her. Get a grip people!
Scott makes the most of the role since the entire film is on her shoulders and she goes through an emotional ringer while also being believable as a pop star, something she is obviously comfortable with herself. She really gets a chance to chew the scenery here and the chewing is good. Gage is quite amusing in his big scene where he goes bonkers. Dylan Gelula is fine as Skye’s best friend and former colleague who is brought back into the fold as someone who might be able to steady the declining star. Peter Jacobson is quite good as Morris, a guy with lots of knowledge of this smile phenomenon and who offers Skye a way to end it, but with a price. Nicholson (son of Jack) makes the most of his “smile” which does recall his father’s in the much scarier 1980 film The Shining. Even Drew Barrymore shows up here as, well, Drew Barrymore, when Skye unloads her personal problems on her TV talk show.
Finn does pull off a couple of effective jump-scares, and his sound mixers certainly know how to ramp up the soundtrack with all the predictable tropes of this genre, but Smile 2 gets too bogged down with the travails of its lead woman under the influence. By the end we really are ready to get off this ride. Certainly, October is the season for horror with Terrifier 3 handing off to this, and Smile 2 then handing off to Venom a week later. But if you ask me, a current inventive genre entry like Demi Moore’s The Substance runs rings around the sequel circus. If there is to be a Smile 3, Finn needs to find a way to invigorate the by-the-numbers concept in the same way Paramount’s horror franchise A Quiet Place has so effectively done over its three editions so far.
Producers are Marty Bowen, Wyck Godfrey, Isaac Klausner, Finn and Robert Salerno.
Title: Smile 2
Distributor: Paramount Pictures
Release date: October 18, 2024
Director-screenplay: Parker Finn
Cast: Naomi Scott, Rosemarie DeWitt, Lukas Gage, Miles Guitierrez-Riley, Peter Jacobson, Ray Nicholson, Dylan Gelula, Raul Castillo, Kyle Gallner, Drew Barrymore
Rating: R
Running time: 2 hr 7 min
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