A solid horror blockbuster that thrills more than the first.
Releasing just two years after the original, Smile 2 is a step up in almost every department.
Smile 2 follows Skye Riley (Naomi Scott), a fictional pop star with a rocky past about to embark on a come back tour. One night, Riley visits an old classmate (and drug dealer) who very violently commits suicide in front of her. In the coming days, Riley begins to see and experience some very strange and unexplainable things…
If you’ve seen the first Smile, then you’ll know how the story goes from here: two hours of jump scare galore and rather heavy-handed metaphors for dealing with trauma. But it really works.
While this is essentially the same story as the first, just with a popstar, I think it’s much superior.
One of the major advantages the sequel has over the original is the lore has already been established. We know how the Smile entity works so there’s no need for scenes and scenes of exposition that dragged the first one down.
The previously established lore allows for Parker Finn (director) to really play around with his concept and play around he does. It feels like we’re getting Finn’s full vision here and it’s quite terrifying.
We never really know what’s real and what’s in Riley’s mind which creates an incredibly tense and uncomfortable watching experience as theoretically anything can happen at any time.
Jump scares have become a bit of a taboo in the horror world as of late with them being labelled ‘cheap scares’ because of decades of saturation. But Smile 2 really knows how to make you leap out of your seat. I suppose it’s easy when you have one every two minutes, some of them are bound to land! The jump scares paired with some genuinely disturbing and gory images makes for a very tense watch.
Naomi Scott gives a career-best performance as the troubled popstar Skye Riley. With the amount of screaming and running around demanded of her, it would be easy for her performance to come off as melodramatic. But, at no point does Scott come across as inauthentic. She is believable and sincere throughout, which adds to our sympathy for the character.
Draw Backs
While there are plenty of creative scares and new characters, the general plot is the same as the first. If Finn plans to make a third it would be nice to see a different take on the concept.
Smile 2 is a contender for most shameless product placement in film history. This is not an exaggeration, Skye Riley only drinks Voss water in the film. They even manage to give us a reason for why she drinks so much and why there’s so many on hand. Every time she drinks from the slick water bottle, we get a lovely shot of the Voss logo. This isn’t necessarily the most scathing criticism, but it does take you out of the film when you are so aware you’re being advertised to.
Despite the mortal sin of too much product placement, Smile 2 is a very fun horror blockbuster. It’s refreshing to see a new horror franchise on the scene that’s actually scary and has a fairly original concept. Hopefully Finn takes this franchise in an interesting direction.
Feature Image Credit: Paramount Pictures