Flip through the latest issue of Gulf Weekly.
Happy Death Day 2U
Starring: Jessica Rothe, Israel Broussard, Rachel Matthews
Director: Christopher Landon
Genre: Superhero
Rating: 15
RUNTIME: 100 Mins
Happy Death Day 2U seems to relish in all its little incongruities. Its over-the-top slapstick slasher absurdity manages to land most of the time but when the third act rolls around it begins to feel like it’s stuck in a time loop just like its cast of plucky college protagonists. Still, welcome overstaying and clunkiness aside, it manages to be a fun, funny genre-bender great for some solid laughs and clever gimmicks.
Picking up almost exactly where the original, Happy Death Day left off, 2U once again focuses on Tree Gelbman (Jessica Rothe) as she’s forced to relive a day in her life over and over again, each time ending with her brutal death. Only this time, we’re clued in as to why it’s all happening.
Several supporting characters here seem to have wandered out of a different movie entirely for about half of the film – something a bit more Back to the Future-flavoured – but that’s part of the fun. Happy Death Day 2U obviously wants the audience to be in on the joke, pulling out every stop to wink and nod at just about every college movie trope it can cram into every scene. You name it, this movie’s got it.
The tongue-in-cheek playfulness isn’t limited to character and narrative tropes. There are no less than three major slow-motion montage moments, each set to appropriately inappropriate music stings, each lasting just a little bit too long to feel organic. There’s a tear-jerking family-driven subplot. There’s even an extended and abrupt pivot where it suddenly becomes a heist movie which is just as out of left field as it sounds.
Rothe is delightfully flexible on 2U’s literal and figurative merry-go-round. Tree manages to both play into and subvert classic Final Girl conventions by maintaining a gleeful gallows humour to temper her anger and frustration. In a movie that is ostensibly about watching a girl die over and over again, Rothe manages to sell both the hilarity and the tension without it ever feeling like voyeurism. Yes, Tree is being punished again and again, but her power is never really stripped away because she’s as in on it as the audience is.
And then there’s Tree’s boyfriend, Carter Davis (Israel Broussard), who plays a rather unfortunately large role in motivating Tree’s decisions. It’s not that Broussard’s performance is lacking, but the script places far too much emphasis on Tree and Carter’s apparent soulmate-level connection to really feel genuine. 2U is at its weakest when it tries to trade its irreverence for sincerity and poor Carter seems to be almost entirely built to be sincere.
Of course, while all this narrative hopscotching is taking place, there’s still a killer afoot. Happy Death Day’s iconic Baby Face Killer has returned with a vengeance and the mystery is fun – at least, when it remembers to exist at all. Unsurprisingly, 2U is a pretty busy movie and every now and again, it seems to actually forget that it’s a slasher flick altogether, barrelling full-speed into the land of sci-fi hilarity before it suddenly U-turns back to figuring out who the killer is.
Despite this slight clunkiness and an overcrowded script, Happy Death Day 2U deserves a healthy amount of praise for pushing its pedal to the metal all the way through. It’s hard not to get the impression that no idea was really shot down in terms of generating story here, no matter how bonkers it all seemed. The level of risk-taking is refreshing, even when it’s not completely successful at every single turn.
Now showing in: Cinepolis Atrium Mall, City Centre, VOX The Avenues
Kristian’s verdict: 3/5
