Smile 2

 

I didn't hate Parker Finn's opening salvo for the Smile horror / gore franchise back in '22 and thought it had some solid jolts and a freakish gimmick (the facial expression of the title) to set it apart from the plethora (to actually mean "excessive amount" rather than just "a lot") of other cinema blood fests that seem to appeal to millennials and their juniors.

In this serving, Finn delivers the story of a musical superstar Skye Riley (a commendable singing / screaming Naomi Scott) who is returning to the concert stage a year after being seriously injured in a car wreck that killed her boyfriend (Ray Nicholson, son of Jack), whom we meet in harrowing flashbacks and spectral visitations.

Because she's still recovering from painful injuries, Skye, who was already a coke fiend, has a wee-bit of a drug problem, a stage-mother-from hell (Rosemarie Dewitt) and recurring hallucinations {?) about eerily grinning people offing themselves in front of her. It's a lot for a young woman to handle -- even one who lives in a Chrysler building apartment and has an eager assistant (Miles Gutierrez-Riley) to indulge her spoiled ass.

In the first Smile, Finn's protagonist was a therapist who discovered this suicidal phenomenon first in her weirdly smiling patients and later among strangers. In #2, Finn merges the worlds of emotional trauma, mental deterioration and the supernatural to bend the audience's perceptions (one might say twist them into pretzels) about what we're seeing as Skye makes her descent into hell.

As is true for the rest of this money-making genre, much of this filmmaker's budget has been spent on raspberry jam, fake entrails and gross prosthetics. Depending on one's expectations about gore, Smile 2 will deliver bucketsful.

That's not to see there aren't other interesting things going for it. In fact, I thought the film's cold opening was especially keen; kudos to cinematographer Charlie Sarroff for setting the bar high for the rest of the picture, which often meets but does not exceed those first minutes.