I can’t believe I might die in the freezer of a fucking Pizza Hut.

Smile 2 is a great movie, which makes it all the more disappointing that I kinda hated parts of it. Nothing about the movie’s production or presentation but just the movie itself. It’s frustrating and annoying, and also incredibly clever but also ridiculous and annoying. The film was directed by Parker Finn, the brain behind the first Smile movie.

Smile 2 stars Naomi Scott who is notably not Ashly Burch as Skye Riley, who is notably not Miley Cyrus. Skye Riley is a singer getting ready for a new tour when her Vicodin dealer Lewis (Lukas Gage) brutally commits suicide in front of her. In case you didn’t watch the first or forgot what it was about, Smile is all about the themes of suicide. The Smile demon is a metaphor for the shared pain that accompanies the death of a close one. The Smile demon infects someone by causing a week of intense hallucinations followed by them finally killing themselves in front of another person, thus transferring the demon.

As a self-contained movie, Smile was a great film albeit frustrating at points. As what is now a series, the idea is building into the realm of tedium and frustration. Because there’s only so much you can do with the concept and the sequel proves that. We know going in for example that every public moment Skye is going to screw up on account of the Smile demon, it’s just a matter of how. We know that the person she’s been confiding most in over the course of the film is probably going to be fake, again. We know the big publicity event is going to go up in smoke, again.

We know that she’s going to meet some guy who inexplicably seems to know how to defeat the demon. Again. And we know that in the end it’s all going to be kinda futile and the hero of the film won’t come out on top, again. It’s just a two hour trudge toward where we know what lies at the end is the equivalent of an Arby’s sandwich. There won’t be anything even remotely satisfying about the ending, so why are we even here? For the journey, I guess.

While the plot beats are virtually the same, I will give points to the movie for going in a completely different direction with the main character. Skye gives the writers and directors the opportunity to live out their dreams of making music videos, with several musical moments peppered in throughout the film. Of course we learn more about Skye’s past and her inner demons because the characters in these movies always have their inner demons. She’s a recovering addict whose boyfriend died in a car accident she was injured in.

Smile 2 showcases that director Parker Finn is on a short trip to using the same one-note mechanics as a crutch. The first film relying heavily on the trope of running a hallucination far past the point of reasonable and then pulling the rug under the viewer to say “ha, that actually never happened” was interesting the first time around. It brought me back to 1408 when John Cusack wakes up on the beach halfway through the film which is one of my favorite parts. And then they do it again. And again.

This happens five times in the two hour film. Possibly more, I stopped counting. And Smile 3 is in production and I have a hunch that Finn is going to do it a third time. Or it might surprise us completely. Like many horror films with demonic entities, the Smile demon’s powers are whatever the director wishes them to have at that exact moment in time. They aren’t consistent, can’t be explained to the viewer, and are as expanding as need be.

Smile 2 brought in about half of the sales of Smile, so while there is a third movie in the works I can only hope that this ends up being the finale in a trilogy. How do you end Smile? I don’t know. You can’t really kill the entity because its existence is a metaphor for inner demons and that’s never going away. Maybe in the third movie a character will finally come to peace with themselves and that will stop “the curse” aspect of that line. Or maybe with the ending of Smile 2 the demon will just kill off the entire population of Earth and it’ll be a post-apocalyptic movie.

Who knows? I don’t particularly care at this point.

Rating: C