Why didn't they just make the story about the police guy from the opening?
It would have been a lot more interesting. His failure to pass on the entity to those thugs and accidentally dooming a (somewhat) innocent bystander. From there we could have followed the police guy, riddled with guilt, trying to save the now doomed guy. On this desperate mission, he unravels some of the mysteries surrounding the Lovecraftian monster.
The opening also had this smooth, sexy one-take, and a general vibe that felt disconnected from the rest of the movie.
Instead the writers had this cool idea that an entire concert crowd got "infected" by the entity in a gruesome, flashy spectacle, so that Smile 3 can be even bigger and louder than the sequel. The entirety of Smile 2 seems to have been written backwards to fit the ending.
I guess they also thought it would be cool that the ending reveal entirely nulls out about half of the movie. "Oh, wow! She was hallucinating this whole time? What was real? Was anything real?" It really gives all the pseudointellectuals something to jerk off to.
But it's an ending akin to "...and then she woke up, and it was all a dream." Lazy! If most of the events and interactions were hallucinations, what was the point of all this?
Skye's long-lost best friend appears in the most dire circumstance, like an angel, to reconcile with Skye and give her a shoulder to cry on when she needs it the most. Oh no, she was just a hallucination, buddy.
What about that scene when Skye brutally murders her own mother? No, no my friend, that wasn't real eh.
Or when she finally accepts help from the kind stranger, ending up in the freezer, only to be attacked, but in a moment of valor, she finally takes control (of her trauma/addiction) and bites back at the entity, ready to redeem herself and vanquish the foe once and for all? Non amigo, that too was all fake. In her head bro.
It doesn't make sense. There's no story here. No character arc. No unravelling of the mystery. No resolution. It's a rug pull. It's just poor.
2 stars for the opening and Naomi Scott's great acting.
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