Producers: Marty Bowen, Wyck Godfrey, Isaac Klausner, Parker Finn and Robert Salerno Director: Parker Finn Screenplay: Parker Finn Cast: Naomi Scott, Rosemarie DeWitt, Dylan Gelula, Miles Gutierrez-Riley, Lukas Gage, Peter Jacobson, Raúl Castillo, Ray Nicholson, Drew Barrymore and Kyle Gallner Distributor: Paramount Pictures
Grade: C+
The dictum that bigger is not always better is demonstrated by Parker Finn’s sequel to his 2022 horror thriller, which was derivative but used the genre tropes well enough to be more enjoyable than most movies of its type. With “Smile 2,” however, Finn ups the ante in terms of size and scares with diminishing returns, especially since it’s telling essentially the same story as the original. “Smile” was compact, tidy and chilling; “Smile 2” is overstuffed, garish and in the end rather silly.
In the first movie the target of the malevolent creature that drives its victims insane with visions of maniacally grinning people before compelling them to commit suicide and pass the curse to a witness of their deaths was a therapist suffering from childhood trauma, and the poor woman eventually succumbed, the entity revealing its grotesque form at the close as the curse was transferred to cop Joel (Kyle Gallner). The new picture begins with Joel trying to pass it on to someone who really deserves it, but accidentally foisting it onto low-level drug dealer Lewis (Lukas Gage).
Lewis passes the curse to Skye Riley (Naomi Scott), the unlucky protagonist this time around. She’s a pop singing star haunted by a traumatic experience of her own. A year ago, deeply into drugs and booze, she was in an auto accident that killed her equally addicted boyfriend Paul Hudson (Ray Nicholson) and left her horribly scarred, physically as well as emotionally; a late flashback shows that she was pretty much responsible for the crash. Now in recovery she’s preparing for a comeback tour, as she explains to the television audience on Drew Barrymore’s talk show. It’s a grueling business overseen by her stage mother-manager Elisabeth (Rosemarie DeWitt) with the aid of ever-ready factotum Joshua (Miles Gutierrez-Riley) that brings her back into contact with her adoring (and sometimes positively obsessive) fans, like a creepy guy (Iván Carlo) for whom an autograph and photo are not enough.
It’s as a result of the pressure she’s feeling that Skye sneaks out of her hotel one night to visit Lewis for some chemical assistance. She finds him bouncing off the walls of his apartment, not merely from all the coke he’s doing but from those smiling apparitions, and he kills himself gruesomely in front of her. Now she’s the creature’s target.
From this point all hell breaks loose for poor Skye as she tries to rehearse her elaborate dance numbers and meet the demands put on her by Elisabeth, her recording boss Darius (Raúl Castillo) and, of course, those periodic apparitions of people grinning malevolently at her. In desperation she turns to her former BFF Gemma (Dylan Gelula), whom she’d alienated earlier, for support.
But, of course, that doesn’t stop the evil entity, whose repertoire of tricks is much expanded this time around, allowing Finn to stage larger disasters for his hapless heroine than he did the first time around. There’s a rehearsal, for instance, where Skye is made to hallucinate an injury to her leg. And a philanthropic event at which she becomes so unhinged when her teleprompter ceases to function that she goes haywire in her remarks. (Of course, it doesn’t help that Hudson rises from the banqueteers and approaches her with that menacing grin. Apparently the entity’s skill at hallucination enters to raising the dead.) The pièce de résistance comes when Skye’s apartment is invaded by her entire troupe of backup dancers, all smiling at her maleficently while assuming group poses.
It’s not that these sequences don’t work as horror devices; they do, for an instant or so, like the jump scares Finn employs with abandon. But they lack the simplicity, and impact, of the single grinning face the first film used—quite sparingly—to great effect, and still carries a wallop here (as in that same meet-and-greet fan event featuring the creepy guy, where a little girl in braces flashes the smile).
The inclination to swing for the fences reaches its pinnacle toward the close, when Skye meets Morris (Peter Jacobson), a guy who claims to have discovered the pattern in the entity’s murderous schemes and figured out a way to end the creature’s reign of terror; all it will take is for her to agree to die for a couple of minutes in a procedure that, following another road chase (flashback to her first terrible crash), requires her to enter a huge freezer at an abandoned Pizza Hut and submit to his experiment. The dark humor of the Pizza Hut reference—the sort of thing the script’s indulged in repeatedly, especially in satirizing the whole music biz—is welcome, but what follows is chaotic, and the conclusion at Skye’s comeback tour premiere, complete with an even more grisly appearance of the creature in its actual form than the first film gave us, tries for a wham-bang gross-out effect that doesn’t come off. (And the warning about bigger-not-better seems poised to be even more applicable if the scope of the sequel suggested by the ending should be realized.)
Simply put, how “Smile 2” goes wrong can be encapsulated this way: “When anything can happen, what does happen doesn’t matter much.” The problem isn’t that in going for ever greater effects, Finn hasn’t violated the rules he’s established, however absurd they might be. It’s that he hasn’t established any rules to be broken. He simply opts for whatever he thinks will create a shock at any moment, and doing so in a big way.
That’s not to say that the movie doesn’t have lots of sporadically effective moments, or that it doesn’t execute them expertly. Charlie Sarroff’s cinematography is particularly effective in its use of tracking shots—the one that constitutes the prologue is really nifty, and ends with a gruesome joke. But the camerawork is always well-judged, especially as enhanced by Elliot Greenberg’s knife-edged editing; he’s not to be blamed for the fact that Finn drags things out to more than two hours. Lester Cohen’s production design and Alexis Forte’s costumes capture the ostentation and glitz of the life of pop stardom with rather grotesque panache. The special effects supervised by Johann Kunz may not be entirely top-drawer, but they’re not far from it.
Then there’s the score by Cristobal Tapia de Veer, an electronic affair whose bumps, clatters and underlying propulsion add immeasurably to the punch of the visuals. Dan Kenyon’s eerie sound design complements it nicely.
And the cast certainly hold nothing back. Scott stints nothing in her frantic desperation, and handles the musical chores more than adequately, while both Gage and Gallner match her in their briefer turns as victims of The Smile. Nicholson is equally out there, though his hysteria is fueled by drugs, not manifestations. The others fill the requirements well—DeWitt and Gelula stand out—but the audience favorite will probably be Gutierrez-Riley, whose ever-compliant Joshua is the epitome of servile subservience.
“Smile 2” will probably be a big hit, and most horror mavens will doubtless rejoice in its glut of effect. But Finn has forgotten the old adage that less is more—something that benefited his first go-around—and in the end it’s proven his undoing.