Smile 2 (2024) Review

Smile 2 (2024)
Director: Parker Finn
Screenwriters: Parker Finn
Starring: Naomi Scott, Rosemarie DeWitt, Kyle Gallner, Lukas Gage, Miles Gutierrez-Riley, Peter Jacobson, Raúl Castillo, Dylan Gelula, Ray Nicholson

The first Smile film came out in 2022 and managed to make a decent impact. On a budget of just $17million, Smile grossed $217million at the worldwide box office, which can be considered very impressive for a bog-standard clean horror picture from the Hollywood system. It was inevitable, therefore, that a sequel film about someone being followed by strange people smiling at them, and beginning to warp their perception of reality, was going to follow in quick succession. That’s what Smile 2 is, for the most part.

Smile 2 tells the story of new pop sensation Skye Riley (Naomi Scott), who is about to engage on a comeback tour after a drug-related automobile accident the year before. Trying to grab pain relief pills from a drug dealer she knows, she witnesses him smash his face in with a gym weight after smiling at her. Now she sees the smile everywhere she goes, and her ability to distinguish truth from fiction is beginning to fade away. Concerningly, her tour is only days away.

The first film was, in essence, an updating of Ring (1998), with a virus-like entity giving someone a seven-day deadline to stop it before it kills you and passes itself on to someone else. It had the issue that it didn’t work if you didn’t find the smiling creepy, because once you get beyond that aspect you realise Smile is a series of badly done cliches held together with cinematic string and chewing gum. Smile 2 has seemingly taken inspiration from elsewhere in Japan, specifically the works of Satoshi Kon (Tokyo Godfathers), with the film feeling like an attempt to mix the original Smile with Kon’s 1997 film Perfect Blue. It’s an attempt to use the Smile parasite as an allegory for grief and stress on young people crushed into a capitalist system intent of reducing them to dollar signs.

This works in theory. In reality, Smile 2 is one of the most astronomically dull horror films of recent times.

The writing, led by writer-director Parker Finn, is nothing to be desired at the best of times and is downright boring at the worst. Suspense sequences go on for far too long, only to end with an undeserved and badly edited jump scare that has been cut with impeccably bad taste. The Satoshi Kon side of the film – the introspective reality-bending character analysis – wants to be lengthy and mysterious and interesting, but the doubled budget of this sequel wants to have creepy smiling people and jump scares because that’s what executives believe will get the kids throwing their popcorn across the room. Neither works because the jump scares are badly done (following a recent trend of simply editing in a scare instead of at least having a constructed, if clichéd, setup and payoff) and they’re too far apart, while the attempted hallucinatory sections, save for one single moment of inspiration to have headlights shine through someone’s skull, are unimaginative. They’re only strange or hallucinatory if you haven’t seen many movies before. Smile 2, in this respect, is like “Surrealism for Dummies”.

The most offensive aspect of Smile 2 is its runtime of 127 minutes. Nobody wants a Smile film this long. Every scene is laborious; so much so that the actors seem desperate to try and escape their own film. Naomi Scott’s cries of anguish as her character plummets further into despair are probably channelled from the reality of the actress realising what film she’s in. Everyone else plods along, doing what they need to, trying to get through the day and clock out with a paycheck.

Nobody needed this film. It doesn’t add or change or develop the mythos of the entity of the original Smile in any way, except for moments that seem to have been drawn from Ring’s sequel, Spiral, that leave just enough on the table for a probable, inevitable, and almost certainly soul-destroying Smile 3.

The scariest part of Smile 2 is realising how many times it almost sends you to sleep. At least schlocky, awful horror films filled with undeserved jump scares don’t end up as an unintentionally hypnotic.

Score: 5/24