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.

Charlie's Angels 2019

Charlie-vous Fancy?

Charlie's Angels 2019
2019 USA Directed by Elizabeth Banks
UK cinema release print.

Wow... before I say anything else, the new Charlie’s Angels movie is not without some minor problems but, honestly, it’s a great movie and I can’t understand why it’s got so many negative reviews from people. It’s frankly a little weird that there are just so many one and two star reviews on the IMDB, for example. Seriously, enough people hated this thing so much that they decided to take the time to vent negatively about it? Well... it almost seems like there’s some kind of bizarre secret agenda against the movie but I’m here to say that the naysayers are dead wrong about this one. I had a blast with it but... now I’ve got that out of the way, like I said, there are a few problems, albeit minor problems... so I’m going to go right in here and tell you about the issues I had with it. But first, a little emotional context...

I remember when the original Charlie’s Angels TV show came out in the UK around about 1976. I would have been twelve and I think I was one of the few boys who watched it. I don’t know why... I already wanted to sleep with some of the Angels at that age so I couldn’t quite figure out why the other kids at school of my sex weren’t all over this one too but, well, it was just mainly a girl thing, somehow. Pretty bizarre. I watched odd episodes here and there, didn’t follow it religiously but I did like the shows I saw.

Cut to the 21st century and McG’s two Charlie’s Angels movies. I loved these and think they’re absolute masterpieces of cinematic magic. The beautiful and constant colour palette changes from scene to scene, the sense of fun and the chemistry between the girls was all absolutely brilliant and I’ve never been able to figure out why we didn’t get another three or four of these.

So, I would have to say my expectations were a little low on this new one because a) I knew it couldn’t top the sheer artistry and perfection of the McG movies and b) the word of mouth on this one was awful. The one thing which did give me hope is that one of the, relatively, younger generation of Hollywood composers who I like a lot... Brian Tyler (see my review of his first concert here) has done the score for this. Indeed, I had the CD in my hands before the movie even opened over here... so I at least knew the music was probably going to be pretty good. I’ll get to that later.

So there I was, hopeful that the film could be okay but really not expecting much from it. And, for the first ten minutes of the film at least, that expectation was sadly on the nose. The opening scene which is the usual ‘conclusion of an adventure’ sequence that the Bond films pioneered and popularised back in the 1960s is here as expected and, although it gets the male chauvinist stuff out in the open fairly on, the action in this lead-in looks like it’s either been too aggressively edited so you can’t see what’s going on or it's maybe cutting around performers who can’t fight in the hopes it may look like they’re kicking ass (which is something a fair few Hollywood movies have done in recent years, unfortunately). Then, when I was expecting a revamped old school homage to the Charlie’s Angels TV show opening like in the McG movies, I instead got a terrible dose of imagery which, may, have been origins of the leading characters... or maybe not. It was going way to fast for me to process and there was some terrible, blary, loud pop singing going on behind the visuals. I was pretty fed up by this point.

However, against all the odds, the film then proceeded to win me over fairly hastily. The three main girls in this... Kristen Stewart, Naomi Scott and Ella Balinska are all pretty amazing and have some really good chemistry. They are ably supported by various people playing ‘Bosleys’... among them Patrick Stewart, Djimon Hounsou and the writer/director Elizabeth Banks as the ‘main Bosley’ of the movie. And a special shout out to Luis Gerardo Méndez playing a ridiculously cool guy named Saint. For every comment I see that the film is trying to make men look stupid all the way through... well, yeah, maybe that’s a bad agenda but, honestly, this character more than makes up for any of the bizarre, ‘man demoting’ sexism perpetrated by the writers here so... yeah, not a problem.

Okay, so the film by this point is stepping up the pace with some really cool action sequences and some nice humour in the right places. Once again the film purposes itself as being a sequel to all incarnations that have gone before it and not a stand alone reboot. In fact, there’s some terrible and obviously 'deliberately tacky' photoshopping of Patrick Stewart with various incarnations of the Angels through the years, which is a nice touch.

Let me sort out some of the bad now.

The action editing in some scenes still looks like it’s trying to hide a lack of fight training... unless, as I said earlier, it’s a deliberately choppy style which doesn’t quite come off. This is unfortunate but it’s not evident in all of the action scenes and they’re still quite exhilarating to watch, nonetheless. Like the previous incarnations, there’s a big emphasis on fun in this movie, even without the ‘colouring book’ cinematography. There were other sequences in the movie which didn’t quite make sense in the edit to me... however. I felt I was being asked to make certain leaps in understanding which I could have done without in simple things of the ‘how did that person suddenly wind up in that vehicle?’ variety. It did look like the editing was trying to make up for some accidentally un-filmed footage now and again but, thankfully, these moments were few and far between.

The only other problem I had was the horrible and ‘mixed in way too loud’ pop songs which punctuate the film at quite a steady lick. They seemed to be the driving force behind some of the montage sequences when, frankly, it should have been the other way around (I mean, McG’s sometimes terrible needle drop music choices were at least supporting the scenes they were being used in, I thought). Again, though, this is countered with... oh , wait, I’ll save the genius of Brian Tyler for a little later.

One thing which, briefly annoyed me was a stupid plot twist which was revealed halfway through the film. I knew it was coming, the audience knew it was coming and... it was so obvious that it enraged me when it happened. Except... turns out the audience are being ‘played’ at this point. Not going to say anymore about that because it would constitute a spoiler but lets just say I so fell for the writer/director’s art of distraction that I was pleasantly surprised (yes, I know, I was surprised... it happens now and again) when the truth of the situation was finally brought to the foreground.

And all this with... oh yeah... Tyler’s score. He’s great at creating the soundscapes for these kinds of films and, though I was hoping for more of the original 70s Charlie’s Angels theme in it... it only makes a brief appearance in an ‘homage’ closet scene... I have to say that the score for this one really knocks it out of the park. It’s got a strong melody line and it mutates into good solid action scoring on a dime. To hell with Brian Tyler, though, for giving me a score which wouldn’t leave my head after the film had finished and wouldn’t let me sleep that night because my brain kept playing it back while I tossed and turned under the sheets. In fact, I’m still humming it as I type. Absolutely first class work from this composer and I can tell this is going to get a lot of spins on the CD player this month. Nice composing from someone who has fast become one of the ‘greats’ of Hollywood scoring.

So, there you go. Not much more to say on this one. Brilliant cast, good chemistry, fast pacing, some mostly good action and a brilliant score... if you can get through the opening ten minutes without turning off, I think you’ll find the new incarnation of Charlie’s Angels is a cinematic delight. And if you want to see a cameo from an old character from the original show, not to mention various other cameos, stick around for the six mini scenes which play out during the end credits. This is a definite Blu Ray purchase for me when it comes out and... well... I just wish I had time to fit in another cinema screening of this one but it’s the wrong time of year for that. Go see it if you can though. With a few tweaks it could have been a masterpiece... instead it's just a really fun, entertaining movie. And who can argue with that?