Starring: Jessica Rothe, Israel Broussard, Phi Vu, Suraj Sharma, Ruby Modine
Distributor: Universal Pictures
Runtime: 100 mins. Reviewed in Feb 2019
| 
| 
It’s hard to imagine a sequel to ‘Groundhog Day’, and for good reason. What could Phil Connors have done in a second film that would have lived up to the temporal and emotional journey that he took the first time around? How could audiences have bought the universe wanting to teach him another lesson, and been encouraged to care again?
When the low-budget horror maestros at Blumhouse announced a sequel to ‘Happy Death Day’, their enjoyable 2017 slasher that borrowed the time-looping shenanigans of ‘Groundhog’, similar questions demanded answers. How could the stakes be sufficiently raised for college student Tree (Jessic Rothe), and how could another temporal glitch be explained away? And with the murderous threat defeated in the first movie, how would they justify the presence of another slasher, or would they even try? While the answers to these questions aren’t as surprising as the original film, writer-director Christopher Landon evolves the story and genre enough to keep fans of the franchise interested, fuelled at every turn by his excellent leading ladies.
In ‘Happy Death Day’, Tree managed to solve the mystery with the assistance of stranger turned friend turned love interest Carter (Israel Broussard), identifying her killer and ending the loop. The sequel wastes no time pinning the blame for this temporal glitch on Carter’s roommate Ryan (Phi Vu), whose quantum mechanics thesis project, a working “Sisysphus Quantum Cooling Reactor” that they’ve nicknamed “Sissy” for the sake of brevity, caused a rift in the multiverse. This anomaly soon results in Ryan experiencing his own death loop at the hands of another Ryan, who has travelled back from another dimension to stop him. Phi Vu, whose character in the first film had one funny line repeated over and over, gets a significantly beefier role this time, but he doesn’t have the charisma to carry it – his reactions are a little hammy and the performance a little airy given the themes explored. That said, the focus quickly returned to Tree.
Amidst all this “wibbly wobbly, timey wimey” mayhem (to borrow the accepted scientifically accurate terminology from ‘Doctor Who’), Tree finds herself stuck in another loop in an alternate dimension, one with a different murderer under the Babyface mask and a handful of changes in character dynamics, such as her roommate Lori (Ruby Modine) no longer plotting to murder her.
Despite the continued threat of the slasher, the sequel tries to reinvent itself in terms of genre, leaning decisively into the comedic undertones that made the first movie such a pleasant surprise. This is reflected acutely in the larger role played by Tree’s sorority sister Danielle (Rachel Matthews), who remains utterly and hilariously clueless. Matthews gives a terrific performance, playing Danielle as a self-aware cliché of sorority girls, and doing so with great comic timing. Outside of the more explicitly comedic tone, the movie also pulls back from the slasher horror of the first movie, moving instead towards science fiction. In the same way that the first film name-checked ‘Groundhog Day’ as an obvious inspiration, here Landon drops ‘Back to the Future Part II’ as a cultural touch-point, reflected foremost in Ryan’s fantastic contraption. Viewers’ mileage will depend on their own genre preferences, but it does a decent job of balancing the two genre traditions.
In this alternate universe, not only must Tree contend with what are essentially strangers that look like her friends plus another slasher, but there’s also the head of the school, Dean Bronson (Steve Zissis), who is trying to shut down Ryan’s rogue experiment. Tree asks Ryan and his lab partners Samar (Suraj Sharma) and Dre (Sarah Yarkin) to find a way to send her back to her own universe, before the Dean or the new Babyface killer can put a dampener on her plans. When Tree uncovers a surprising development, she is faced with the unexpected question of whether she really wants to return to her own timeline at all. Landon cleverly uses this development, which I won’t spoil here, to give the movie some emotional heft, which Jessica Rothe handles with aplomb. The first film made it clear that she was a talent to be watched, and she ensures that Tree remains a compelling character, despite most of her personal growth behind her in the previous film. She’s funny and fearless, and never struggles to hold your attention. When she’s on screen, she unquestionably elevates the movie.
Landon’s screenplay liberally tips its hat to fan favourite moments from the first film, including another death montage played for laughs (this time set to Paramore’s head-bopping pop-rock song ‘Hard Times’). While the montage on the surface looks to be playing with Tree’s repeated suicide (she’d rather die quickly at her own hand than face her killer again and again), it’s not really as morally troubling as it sounds, because she performs the act with the knowledge that she will wake up again with the day reset.
The success of the first film is reflected in this one’s higher budget (DP Toby Oliver gets his hands on a super slow-motion camera for a few impressive sequences, and the effects are generally a little better), though it’s still far from carte blanche film-making. There are a few sequences and sets that reflect Blumhouse’s characteristic shoestring costs, such as some obvious green-screen work and an abandoned hospital floor that looks more like a Halloween attraction than an actual hospital.
The big looming question then: is it as good as the first movie? The short answer is no, but it’s a solid effort to recapture the lightning that struck with the first film. It may feel sometimes like it’s just repackaging the best bits from its predecessor, but thanks to the charm and talent of Jessica Rothe, ‘Happy Death Day 2U’ is still good fun.
Callum Ryan is an associate of the Australian Catholic Office for Film & Broadcasting.
12 Random Films…
