The 268th review overall!
It’s the last day of my vacation, and I’d say it was a pretty successful one, I could get used to never having to work. I ended my vacation by doing a whole lot of laundry, had some City BBQ with the family, then we sat down to watch...
Happy Death Day 2U (2019). HBO Go.
The story picks up pretty much right where the last one leaves off. Except instead of Tree waking up and following her around, you get Carter’s roommate Ryan who is seemingly stuck in the loop. From there the movie follows the same formula as the last one until the killer get revealed and the movie takes a hard left turn into science fiction territory. It’s a fun new direction and after seeing trailers, I really wasn’t expecting what I got.
It’s still very good, just different. Thankfully, after the opening shenanigans, it changes early and you follow around Tree instead of Ryan. I like Ryan just fine, but he works best as a side character, but it’s better to focus on Tree because she is awesome. Jessica Rothe is all kinds of fantastic in these movies. There’s just something infinitely entertaining watching her try to unravel the mystery while teetering back on forth on keeping it together and completely losing it. Instead of letting the killer decide her fate, when she knows there’s nothing more to accomplish that day, she kills herself and there’s a montage that’s just insane in the best ways. It’s a shame Rothe is not in more things because she’s hilarious, can do serious and has a real knack for physical comedy without being a cartoon character.
Like I mentioned earlier, this one is a lot more sci fi, in fact, just about all the horror is taken out once the movie gets going. The babyface killer isn’t in the movie that much and outside of the beginning and the end, isn’t much of a focus of the movie. It almost seemed like they forgot about that thread and just kind of threw something together at the end to tie up the loose end, because the reveal didn’t work for me at all. In the first one the killer’s identity made sense and was a nice cap to the movie. Since the killer wasn’t much of a focus in this one, during the first reveal I thought, “eh”, then there’s a SECOND reveal followed by a stupid twist that was just silly. Thankfully it gets resolved pretty quickly.
I’m at a loss on how to discuss this further with getting slightly spoilery, so if you like to go in fresh, skip this paragraph. Through some sciencey stuff, the time loop gets explained, I preferred the mystery but whatever it’s not bad. Eventually the same experiment that started the whole thing fires off again and knocks Tree into a multiverse. Everything is pretty much the same but with small differences. For one, Carter is dating Danielle, the head of the sorority from the first one, Tree’s roommate isn’t the killer and there’s one major difference that I won’t mention. It brings up an interesting question if a person should stay or go back to their own reality and the scenes with deal with that question are surprisingly emotional. It made me think a lot more than I expected with a name like Happy Death Day 2U.
It’s not as good as the first one, I prefer horror to science fiction, but it’s still damn good and very funny. It’s hard to imagine any other actress being able to pull off the character Tree, and I’m glad I don’t have to, because you can’t say enough about how good Jessica Rothe is in these movies.
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