'Happy Death Day 2U'

As this film began, I felt an overwhelming sense of relatability to the main characters; this is because, just as they were experiencing the same day over and over again, I felt as if I was watching a film that I had seen 100 times before. This isn't an offhand remark about this film being too similar to its predecessor as I haven't ever seen the first film and after seeing its sequel, I don't plan to.

In case the intro didn't make this abundantly clear, I have some problems with this film. The problem I noticed first was the main character's performance, or at least the starting main character's performance. He did his best work when he wasn't speaking, as he would often slur certain words together and seemingly miss some words out entirely. His doing this constantly left me wondering if they couldn't do another take and whether or not they had a reason to leave these mistakes in the final edit. If you think that the filmmakers did this intentionally then that's completely acceptable, but to me at least it came off as totally amateur and somewhat shortsighted on the director's end. This problem did, however, become less noticeable as the main character who we start the film with is eventually replaced with the main character from the first film. The other performances were mostly serviceable at best.

Having not seen the first film, I didn't find myself worried about it, thinking that the plot could be mostly gleamed from the trailer so I didn't bother watching it before seeing the sequel. It seemed as if the writer predicted this because in the middle of the first act there's a recap of the entire plot of the first film, including clips from said film. This was actually not a problem for me, as it was kept extremely brief and did somewhat fit in naturally with the plot of the film.

Speaking of plot. It's not great. Seeing as it's a dumb groundhog horror film that I didn't think it would be, but they totally confuse it with one particular scene in which our typical nerd character explains in typical over the top science jargon that there's a possibility there are multiple dimensions in the film; I felt this rather exemplified the problems within the plot of the film. It was, or rather could have been, a dumb but fun romp with groundhog day rules, but instead, there are several scenes dedicated to explaining this phenomenon that bogs down the film. This essentially meant that rather than being a comedy thriller with a dash of romance, it was a comedy thriller sci-fi with a dash of romance, and this meant the main problem of the film became even more present.

The intention of a film is very important to look at when critiquing it. However, this is extremely difficult for this film, as I can honestly not tell what this film wanted to be. There were a lot more jokes than I was expecting, very few of which landed, there weren't many horrific/scary scenes, all of which failed to scare, and the amount of sci-fi and romantic scenes were frankly baffling. When I say baffling, I mean there were too many. It was as if the editor got bored and spliced in some live action Rick and Morty footage alongside some god awful rom-com from the mid 2000s. As a comedy it failed to make me laugh, as a thriller it failed to excite me, as a horror it failed to scare me, as a sci-fi it failed to interest me, and as a romance it failed to make me feel a thing.

Despite all these criticisms I have for the film, it did entertain me, however, I don't think it was intentional at all. Most of the entertainment came from the sheer confusion some of the character's actions and dialogue gave me, and that's not mentioning the occasional terrible line delivery. The film never left me bored, but it did leave me very disappointed. Seeing the trailer with the suicide montages, I thought that this film was going to be fun and clever, but sadly it wasn't and when the film arrived at the death montage, I was disappointed to find that most of the more fun deaths had been in the trailer and were actually a lot more fun when taken out of context.

If this sounds like something that you might also find entertaining, I would recommend it, but I would advise against a cinema viewing, as my cinema was packed to the brim with 13-year-olds giggling at every least unfunny gag in the film and generally being very loud. I see this film as a sad waste of a very good premise, and I hope that if there's a sequel, it rectifies some of the issues listed above.