Review: Happy Death Day 2U

Second film, same as the first only this time science nerd Phi Vu is the one tasked with reliving the day of his death over and over. He brings this to the attention of the previous person afflicted by this phenomenon (Jessica Rothe) and her boyfriend (Israel Broussard) and together they try to solve the dilemma which this time involves science-y stuff. Yay.

I was seemingly one of the few dissenting voices with the first “Happy Death Day”, as I felt it was a lame, tame, and annoying blend of “April Fool’s Day” (which I didn’t like either) and “Groundhog Day”. It was irritating, repetitive and zero fun death scenes. The latter was a total head-scratcher to me. Well now writer-director Christopher Landon (“Happy Death Day”, “Scout’s Guide to the Apocalypse”) is back with this 2019 sequel that introduces time-travel to the mix, and the results…are pretty much the same. Yeah, this one sucks pretty badly too, although at least by focussing so much on Phi Vu’s character in the first third, it stops Jessica Rothe’s rather unpleasant character and performance from ruining the film quite so much this time. However, Rothe’s presence does end up dominating the second half of the film, and she’s as unlikeable as ever (Quite possibly a Top 10 Most Unlikeable Horror Movie Character Ever candidate). To be honest, Vu isn’t much better looking half-asleep for much of the film. He’s dull.

For the most part this is the same damn film, but with Vu going through most of the torture, at least for the first part of the film. Rothe and returnee Israel Broussard are in the corners of the page for this section, with the latter seeming like a completely different guy for some strange reason. It’s like throwing Vu into the mix, and putting him in the lead for a while throws off the dynamic that Rothe and Broussard had in the first film. In fact, the entire film gave me the impression of a strange shooting schedule where none of the actors were ever on set at the same time, even though they quite clearly are. It feels…off. The fact that Rothe (and her trademark off-putting Resting Bitch Face) knows what Vu’s going through is meant to be a new wrinkle, as is the introduction of time-travel but I needed a whole lot more than that to hook me in. We’re still getting tame and uninteresting kills and boring/bitchy characters, time-travel doesn’t help fix that at all. Meanwhile, trying to shoe-horn the idea that Vu’s science geek character is responsible for the time loop to begin with is some hi-grade Midichlorean insulting bullshit. It also doesn’t work as a horror film, it plays like a really macabre episode of “The Big Bang Theory” minus the actual humour. Speaking of science-related things, the finale suggests that Landon has a fundamental misunderstanding of how magnets work. So there’s that, too.

Essentially the same film with a few new wrinkles to the formula that for someone who hated the first film, don’t really help at all. If you liked the first film, you may like this. I didn’t and didn’t. It reminds me of the bad old days post-“Scream” of watered-down snarky horror.

Rating: D+