After a stunning debut in 2017, the clown Pennywise finally ushered in his curtain call.
The horror master Stephen King's "The Clown's Soul" can be described as one of his masterpieces. In addition to telling about the thrilling battle of wits between Losers and the clown, it also exposed a lot of human ugliness. The small town of Derry has become a combination of capitalist ills: calm on the surface, but turbulent in nature. The cruelty and indifference of human nature are revealed here.
The original novel, which is more than 1,000 pages long, adopts a cross-narrative technique, interspersed with the stories of the protagonist's childhood and adulthood. The movie is to divide these two time points into two movies. While the previous game focused on childhood Losers, this episode puts the spotlight on adult Losers.
Adult Losers can be described as the biggest attraction of the whole film. I still remember that when "The Clown Returns" was first released in 2017, netizens gave the actor candidates for the adult Losers they wanted. And this casting is beyond imagination. The adult Losers actors and the young actors are very similar in appearance. The superb acting skills of the adult actors also allow the distinctive character of each member of Losers to be well continued. In the eyes of the audience, they are Losers when they grow up.
The best adult actor is Bill Hader's Richie. This character has been one of my favorites since the first episode. With his mouth full of trains, he looks rebellious and is actually the most vulnerable of the Losers. He buries his inner insecurities with vulgar profanity and slang. It's a pity that the more he tried to hide these feelings, the more they appeared in his mind. Bill Hader elevates this ambivalence in the second episode and makes Richie a character that fits the psyche of many in today's society. While he brings laughter to the audience, he can also resonate with everyone.
The comeback of "child-eating professional" clown Pennywise is short-lived but amazing. Bill Skarsgard perfectly portrays a vicious, cunning, and outrageous villain. The ever-changing Pennywise has fully demonstrated his seventy-two transformation skills in this episode, turning into various terrifying monsters to fight the Losers. The visual design of these monsters is very novel and very creepy. However, when the film is full of these monsters, Pennywise's mystery disappears, and his horror index is discounted. Even so, this version of Pennywise remains one of the scariest characters in the genre. Every second he played was fantastic.
As mentioned earlier, the small town of Derry, as a microcosm of the drawbacks of capitalism, reveals a lot of human ugliness. These topics are discussed in more depth in this episode. The cruelty and indifference of humanity contrasts with Pennywise's wretched smile. It's just that these discussions are only a small taste, and they did not have an overly strong impact on the plot. This one disappointed me a bit.
The rhythm of the nearly 3-hour movie is not very good. As a movie of the same length, the rhythm of "Avengers 4" is much quicker and neater. The main plot of "Joker's Soul 2" is very boring, and the one hour in the middle can even be shortened to 20 minutes. This main line not only fails to further develop the characters, but also makes the film seem extremely lengthy. A 3 hour movie feels like 4 hours of watching. When a horror movie is so long and it can only fill the screen with blood and monsters, it is no longer a scary horror movie. The final scene of the film made me feel like I was watching a Marvel blockbuster, not a horror movie.
Even so, "Joker's Soul 2" is still wonderful all in all. Losers' excellent performance and Pennywise's surprise overshadowed the film's failure to make this supposedly boring film even more exciting. As the end of the "Joker's Soul" series, this episode is still one of the more sincere horror films in recent years.
Overall score: 7.5/10
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