The first Happy Death Day film, released in October of 2017, was a rare kind of “fun mediocrity” that I seldom experience these days at the theater. Growing up in the last decade, and the early portion of this one, I always felt like most movies I considered “mediocre” were inadequate attempts at interesting ideas, or vice versa—messy platters containing both good and bad morsels that, when mixed together, averaged out to a maybe-passable meal. Those mediocre films often had elements—the good morsels—that stuck with me or made me appreciate a film more, despite its glaring shortcomings.
But it seems Hollywood’s current ideal for the “average” film is one that is pervasively and holistically unambitious and uncreative, dropping any sort of flair for the unique or unusual in favor of boring ideas, expected tropes, bland characterization, formulaic pacing and plotting, and no style. I probably evaluate these movies particularly harshly (see my review of Robin Hood); perhaps it’s somewhat of a protest of this homogenized mediocrity as I long for the mixed-bag mediocrity of my earlier years.
But Happy Death Day, despite not being a “good” film, per se, stuck out to me, because it reminded me of those inconsistent, good-with-the-bad movies I watched with friends in my teens. Of course, those movies still exist, it just seems like there are fewer of them, and more of the “processed” films I lament now. HDD had an interesting premise—not all that original (it’s an approximation of Groundhog Day, but as a slasher film), but unique at least within its genre.
Our protagonist, Tree (Jessica Rothe), is a selfish, inconsiderate party girl who gets trapped in an eternal loop in which she repeatedly gets murdered on her birthday, until, with the help of some unlikely friends, figures out who the killer is and breaks the cycle, and in the process learns the value of respecting others (kind of) and not being a self-absorbed douche, I guess? It wasn’t a daring genre-bender, and it was funnier than it was scary (by design), but it had a somewhat wholesome message and featured a handful of charmingly edited montage sequences of death, sleuthing, and friendship-building. It wasn’t great, and not really even good when broken down, but I had fun with it in parts.
Just sixteen months later, Blumhouse Productions, maestro of highly-produced, campy horror, decided the world needed another HDD film, this time titled Happy Death Day 2U, and after the way this one ended, I fully expect a Happy D3ath Day D3ar Tr33 and a Happy Death Day 4U.
Anyway, 2U is a fitting but probably unworthy sequel to a film that already wasn’t much to live up to. Where HDD featured plenty of tenets of slasher films, blended with lots of comedy, 2U essentially abandons the slasher portion, featuring maybe threeish scenes in total that were even intended to be scary, and none that are. But 2U maintains the sense of humor of its predecessor while leaning more into lazy, unconfident sci-fi as it introduces the concept of multiple parallel dimensions. Essentially, one of Tree’s new friends, Ryan (played like a first-time actor by Phi Vu), gets stuck in a deadly time loop of his own when his college science experiment in quantum physics goes wrong. Through a series of nonsense events, this leads to Tree getting stuck once again in her original time loop, only this time, in another dimension; one where her new boyfriend Carter (Israel Broussard), also her moral guide through the first film, is dating her bratty roommate, and her mother, who died before the events of the first film, is still alive. Torn between going back to her home dimension to be with Carter and staying in this new dimension to have her mom back, Tree must also figure out who the new killer is in this dimension so she can break the loop, regardless of where she goes or stays from there.
It’s a complicated premise for such a simple-minded movie, and it has neither the patience nor intellect to deal with the inner-workings of its own established spacetime manipulation mechanics.
Of course, the inciting device of this film, Ryan’s science project, is a convenient remedy to what was a major gap that was unaddressed in the first film: how Tree’s time loop started in the first place, and why stopping her killer solved it. But 2U stirs up plenty of its own holes that I hope aren’t covered in a third film. I usually avoid criticizing plot holes, but I feel differently when the issues are central to the film’s premise and resolution.
Lazy plotting aside, sci-fi just isn’t as fun of a direction for 2U as the slasher genre was for the first film. It just ends up feeling like a feel-good “race against time” comedy, and the sci-fi elements aren’t really used other than as a plot device.
Actor performances are about the same this time around, that is to say, uneven but mostly functional, and sometimes fun. Rothe gets a little more emotional meat to bite into this time with her mama drama, and that makes for a surprisingly heartwarming (if obvious) message. I’d say the first film was more fun to watch, but 2U perhaps has a little more to say.
In the end, Happy Death Day 2U is fine, as was the first film, neither one being resonant nor particularly impressive, but 2U kind of misses what was fun and almost fresh-ish about its predecessor: the energetic juxtaposition of fast-paced levity against the darker slasher backdrop. 2U doesn’t really have anything to contrast its humor against, and thus ends up a half-baked comedy. It’s not *much* worse than the first film, but when the first already set a relatively low bar, the drop down to “completely useless” is a pretty short one, and 2U falls that much closer to the unambitious modern sense of mediocrity than the preferred mixed-bag makeup of the first film.