Smile 2

Two Million Miles

Smile 2
Directed by Parker Finn
USA/ Canada 2024
Paramount Pictures
UK Cinema Release Print.

Warning: Some implied spoilers as to the endings of the Smile movies.

Well, once again Paramount Pictures is testing the water to see if their potential audience are ready to walk a million miles for one of their Smiles and, from what I can hear in the overwhelming furore of positive feedback, I suspect the box office will certainly support the idea that there’s a lot of worn shoe leather out there this weekend.

I liked the first film quite a bit but think it went a little off track towards the end. Smile 2, is a much better sequel and, although it has nothing as standout as the ‘head dangling’ moment from the first one, I think this one is a much more accomplished movie and it’s just well written and directed (both credits to Finn for that) and has an absolutely incredible lead performance by actress/singer/song writer Naomi Scott. In this she plays pop singer Skye Riley, about to open her comeback tour after her formally drug fuelled ‘bad gal of rock’ days ended with a car crash that scarred her and killed her famous boyfriend, one year prior to the events in this film. In this story she is accompanied by her mum, played really well by Rosemarie DeWitt, who really goes all out in a gory scene in the last quarter of the movie.

The now clean and sober Skye, it turns out, is not prescribed very strong drugs because of her past history of abuse but she’s in quite a lot of pain in her back still from where she was injured in the car wreck. So in order to perform all her dance choreography she has a drug dealer she calls on for really strong pain killers. However, said drug dealer, as we see from the opening sequence, has become host to the Smile demon, which was also the antagonist of the first film (although, now I think back to that early scene, I’m not quite sure how this particular guy got himself infected, truth be told).

Anyway, if you remember the first film (reviewed here), the demon will toy with a person, feeding off their negativity and fear for a number of days, before making them kill themselves in front of someone wearing the big rictus grin of the marketing campaigns for the two movies, thus passing the demon on to the next victim. So when Skye goes round to his apartment late one night to try and get some pain killers, he bashes himself repeatedly in the face, to death, with a weight from his personal gym and transfers the demon into her... something she is more than made aware of not long after the incident.

The rest of the film is basically Skye trying to do press tours and ready herself for her concert while trying to ward off the constant smile demons and hallucinations of violence and carnage hijacking her throughout... some of which might be real and some of which may not. And it’s ferocious and fast paced and, honestly, almost every shot (apart from the pre-credits sequence involving some drug dealers) features Naomi Scott expressing a huge amount of different and often quite wild and strenuous emotions... she’s nothing short of sensational in this role. I’m pretty sure this must have been a lot of hard work for her because it can be exhausting just watching the thing.

Acting aside, it’s also nicely directed and has some wonderful shot compositions and even some nice dance choreography for some of the scenes. Some nice scene transitions too... such as when she is in an elevator (well, over her in the UK they are called lifts) and the doors open and instead of it being the lobby of the building, it opens onto the next shot which is a birds eye view of her pulling up in a car at her next destination... so expedient but creative shot design is the name of the game here. Although, to be honest, I’m still not quite sure why a lot of moderns directors lately seem to want to turn the image upside down in various scenes. It’s almost become a bizarre trend now and there’s a lot of that kind of shot in this movie.

All this makes for a fast paced horror story (you won’t feel the two hours plus running time) and it also has another wonderful score by the composer of the first, Cristobal Tapia de Veer. Although, like the first, the studio has not seen fit to issue a proper, stand alone CD of said score so, yeah, I guess I won’t be able to listen to this one either.

I will comment on the ending here though. Like the first one, Smile 2 is unrelentingly grim and, if possible, even darker than the first one. The ending is somewhat similar in some ways and, I wish I could say I didn’t see it coming but there’s a big clue as to what the demon benefits from latching onto a multi-media singing sensation and the film takes us to that place... but it at least does so in a way which makes more logical sense than the first movie, which seemed to have a bleak ending just for the sake of bleakness. This one doesn’t do that and, in a way, sets up for a sequel which could be a very elevated version of the evil experiences in the first two movies. I won’t say too much more about that but the central logic of the premise is better served by the ending it gets here, for sure... although I can’t help but think that if a third movie is made, they might decide to ignore the ending of this one and do something different to save on potential budgetary requirements.

Suffice is to say, I thought Smile 2 was great and look forward to revisiting it again on Blu Ray at some point soon. If you liked the first one then you should have absolutely no problem with the second one and, if you didn’t... well this one is a more polished and well thought through movie so, maybe still give it a go.