October 21, 2024
Pop singer Skye Riley (Naomi Scott) was making a comeback in the concert scene months after a traumatic vehicular accident that also killed her boyfriend. Unbeknownst to her mother/manager Elizabeth (Rosemarie DeWitt), Skye was secretly still taking Vicodin for her back pains. She went to her drug addict friend Lewis (Lukas Gage) to buy her stash. However, Lewis was acting all crazy, until he killed himself with a barbell weight in front of Skye.
This new film is a direct sequel of the 2022 sleeper horror hit about a deadly curse (marked by a crazy smile on his face) passed from one victim to the next one who witnesses his death. At the end of the first "Smile," policeman Joel witnessed the suicide of her cursed girlfriend Rose, so he got the curse. At the start of this "Smile 2," Joel was able to pass the curse before he died, which was how Lewis had the curse that he then passed on to Skye.
This sequel was again written and directed by Parker Finn, which was why everything stayed true to the original. Finn also brought back basically the same creative team who worked on the first film with him. so the eerie atmosphere was recreated to a T. Cinematography was also by Charlie Sarroff and the suspenseful editing by Elliot Greenberg. Musician Cristobal Tapia de Veer also had to come up with Skye's concert songs with pretty good beats.
Naomi Scott had quite a challenge playing a pop superstar struggling to recover from a dark episode of her life. Now that the curse was passed unto Skye, Scott had to undergo the whole ordeal of this mercurial entertainer slowly beginning to lose her grasp of what was real and what was illusion. Scott's portrayals of hysteria and paranoia were so convincingly real, which added much to the dramatic and fear quotients of this film.
The gore level of this sequel was more intense than the first film, although I am not really a fan of extreme gore. Among the best scenes for me include the one when the teleprompter malfunctioned when Skye was speaking onstage at a charity event, and the one when Skye was terrorized by her backup dancers all with sinister smiles on their faces. The "Little Shop of Horrors"-like ending has given this franchise a potentially more epic future ahead. 7/10.
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