Getting killed is such a drag. It would be so much more tolerable if every day didn’t start with a walk of shame. Wait. I did this. And so did they. Cashing in on one of the best plots of 2017, the makers of Happy Death Day rolled their fuzzy dice and gambled that we’d enjoy seeing it about 17 more times. They were almost right.
You’ll need a bit of background to suffer this sequel. The original Happy Death Day was the rarest of the rare: a clever horror, pitting sorority fixture Tree (Jessica Rothe) in an infinite Groundhog Day-type loop where she relives a terrible birthday that ends in her death every.single.night. When we left off in the first film, Tree had finally closed her iterative tragedy by catching her killer and getting her guy, Carter (Israel Broussard).
Uh oh, looks like Carter’s roomie, Ryan (Phi Vu), is stuck in the same loop. The original film portrayed Ryan as an insignificant stoner moron. OK, maybe we judged him a bit harshly; turns out Ryan is more of a luckless physicist nerd. And this film is his story. Or it is until Tree takes it over again. Well, geez, you selfish frat-zilla (sorori-zilla?), you already got to explore, like, twenty branches of your reality; can’t you let somebody else take root?
Let me explain. Ryan wakes up in a parked car and experiences his take on Tree’s repeating day, except this time Ryan ends up dead and repeats his own day. This really seems to be his movie. Even when he tells Tree about it, she clues in that the loop is repeating, and the improv Scooby gang of Tree, Ryan, and Carter quickly hunt down the source of the time repeat and the murder, which both are Ryan himself. Ryan, it seems, has created a machine that loops time, which is cool, but created an alternate universe in which Ryan existed twice, so he felt he had to kill himself – by bringing a butcher’s knife to a basketball game. I guess some colleges are really lax on security. It seems Ryan, like Tree, can remember his former day, but once Tree gets into this, Happy Death Day 2U once again becomes her loop, her challenge, her murder all over again. Fuck Ryan.
I’m of a mixed mind on this one. There’s both so much to love and so much to hate in this film. On the love side, the plot remains a classic – Groundhog Day murder mystery, like a video game, you gotta go until you solve it. I also love having fun with iterations – things that are different in the alternate universe or only make sense in one world but not the other. The take here is Tree has to learn enough time travel physics to help actual physicists rebuild their time travel device properly, because when the day resets she’s the only one with a working memory of the failed iterations; when the project fails, again, Tree has to kill herself to restart the loop which leads to a delightful suicide montage – think Groundhog Day, only fun.
On the dark side, well, there is no shortage there, either. First, you stole Ryan’s film, and you’ve made his portion inconsistent with the plot. Why does Ryan not remember his subsequent iterations when he clearly remembered the first one? Next, the films loops have morphed motivation enough such that the new reality is completely inconsistent with the first. The morph makes the film seem less real and more like an acting seminar: “Now this time, you’re the killer. Go!” Then there’s time travel itself which is handled better on any given episode of “Rick and Morty.” Simply stating that you’ve seen the Back to the Future trilogy doesn’t actually make your take on time travel any better. Most importantly however, Happy Death Day 2U committed the cardinal sin of a sequel: it made the original seem worse upon reflection, and it did this by telling us the loop was human generated and not divine. That’s unforgivable.
I don’t know if it’s a deliberate reflection on reliving the same day, but one the small things that bugged me in Happy Death Day 2U is Jessica Rothe actually looks older now. And it’s not just that she looks older when she is supposed to look the exact same age; she now looks too old for college. This might just be a bigger thing as I hear calls for a trilogy. I love the idea, but I’m good with just one of these films.
♪Standing in the middle of the quad
Wondering when this’ll end
Not gonna do my homework tomorrow
If this is a trend
Now I’m back from departed
Here I live once again
Day after day I get up and misplay
My suicide bend♫
Rated PG-13, 100 Minutes
Director: Christopher Landon
Writer: Christopher Landon
Genre: Slasher. Wince. Repeat.
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: Students half-assing college
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: Leonard from Memento
♪ Parody Inspired by “Do It Again”
