j* Movie Reviews 2019

Happy Death Day 2U (2019)

All the joyous stabby fun of the first one with a far more complicated and trippy premise.

I really, really dug the first Happy Death Day, and fell totally in love with the characters, especially Tree (Jessica Rothe). So getting a second viewing of all her amazing emotions was always going to be exciting. And this one totally delivers all the Tree excellence plus a whole lot more.

Where the first one channelled Ground Hog day, with inbuilt jokes about it's obsolescence/irrelevance as a movie for twenty something girls, this one dives into Back to the Future territory, and names it up just as deliciously. Where the first one keeps it simple and reworks the day without much care for the problem itself, this one delves a lot deeper, trying to find the source code causing the time-loop. It puts an excellent shiny-science sphere machine right smack bang in the middle, and a group of physics nerds front and centre.

I don't feel I'm selling this movie.

Like the first, you never know where you're at in the film... it feels like it ends and restarts, ends and wraps up only to go for another half hour. In the first film this was a little weird, but I knew to expect it going in on this one... and the result is delicious uncertainty about what's about to happen.

And the uncertainty delivers too - there are more twists and more weirdness and more gleeful abandon of story type along the way. It's hard to give a sense of this without spoilers, but it gets pretty liberal with time-slips, multi-verses and quantum mechanics. Sort of Sliders and Back to the Future and Loopers/?? All rolled into one. With knives, guns, axes and wonderful use of both screwdrivers, photobombs and MRIs. So many excellent lines "we're scientists and that's what we do!"

Saw it with people who hadn't seen the first, and I'd say it's definitely possible to watch and enjoy this one without having seen HDD1. However, be aware firstly that this film gives a LOT of spoilers about the first one. And it also has some scenes where the full impact of what you see can't be understood if you don't know the backstory from the first. Plus you don't get the joy of seeing how many of the original cast (and part players) they get back, nor the full impact of Tree's return to Monday the 18th.

J* gives it 5 stars.

PS. I can't fault it, wouldn't change a thing, loved the ride the whole way through. Different than, but easily as good as the first one.