Smile 2

Tween horror. Perfect to have on in the background whilst making tiktoks or like somthing I dunno lol. I get the feeling the script for this was written in text speak and emojis. I'm not sure if this is Blumhouse, I couldn't summon enough interest to bother finding out. If you've seen the first flick (not movie and certainly not film), you know what this is about, cheese "jump scares" that solely rely on the sound being loud and some tween-palette friendly "gore" - a bit of blood. Nothing's shocking, horrifying or engaging and the "acting" is terrible, which is maybe the most shocking element. That guy that was in The White Lotus, I've seen be good in things other than this, he's not good in the 5 minutes or so he's in this. Naomi Scott waddles round like a less obese version of Florence Pugh with even less charisma. She's pretending to be a pop star, a story misstep that leads to some AI generated music that somehow sounds a decade or so dated. Film could have been vastly improved if it was ~80 minutes of Scott being attack with a screwdriver, but that didn't happen and it's 2hours of mediocrity. Looking at the sidebar here, it made money, so I guess we're getting Smile 3. With some luck, that will be an entirely AI project and no actual creatives will be harmed in the creation process.

The only thing I can remember about the first Smile (2022) was that it went downhill after that opening scene with the patient. I had no intention of watching a second one until I saw it was Naomi Scott, "... fine." Now I'm looking forward to the next one. Naomi Scott carried this film with her performance.

First Smile was a great horror movie. I was worried that second one wouldn't be very good as usually this is how it happens, but thankfully, Smile 2 was a great continuation of first one. It didn't disappoint. I'm very pleased with Smile 2. They did great.