In short: Happy Death Day 2U (2019)

Or as the working title probably went, Low Effort: The Movie. Having spent a whopping whole day recuperating from the ordeal of the first movie, and after the film briefly pretends to have changed protagonists setting things up it isn’t going to touch on again at all with it, Tree Gelbman (Jessica Rothe) is again trapped in a time loop on her birthday that only ends when she’s killed by a knife wielding killer in a baby mask. But this time, she’s also sucked into an alternative version of her world, so a couple of things are mildly different for her, including the identity of the killer, which will turn out to make even less sense than that in the first one.

You’d think that adding a bit of alternative world travel to the time loop and die set-up of Happy Death Day would automatically include complications or ideas beyond the most functionally obvious, but returning director Christopher Landon – now responsible (I’m using this specific word with purpose) for the script too – clearly doesn’t want to strain his brain or the assumed pea-sized ones of the audience too much. So the alternative world is really only there because the film would otherwise have had to come up with something more interesting for the killer part of the plot, and to get some cheap sentimental kicks in that would have looked trite to old Steve Spielberg in his most sentimental mood.

The new killer’s identity and shenanigans are treated with a perfunctory shrug, the film never even trying to turn them into an actual threat. You could read that as an attempt to not make the same movie again, but if the film really wanted that, it would probably have at least attempted to replace the mock-giallo parts of the first film with anything interesting at all, instead of going through the same rigmarole again, just with obvious disinterest.

Frankly, I don’t have any idea what the film is supposed to be there for beyond cashing in on the first one and turning the whole affair into a franchise with the inevitable mid-credits sequence. There certainly aren’t any new ideas here, or at least old ones recycled with verve. As a matter of fact, I’d say there isn’t even an actual film here, it just looks and sounds like one.


There’s something positive in this whole mess, though: the laziness of the sequel brings into stark contrast how well-constructed and cleverly realized the first one actually was. Reader, I now believe I was too critical in my assessment of the first one!