Smile 2 Parent Guide

Pop megastar Skye Riley (Naomi Scott) is gearing up for a big international comeback tour. It’s her first major public appearance since a series of drug related scandals which culminated in a car accident which injured her and killed her boyfriend, actor Paul Hudson (Ray Nicholson).

Skye’s been clean for a year since the accident, but the pain isn’t going away, and her doctors won’t give her anything stronger than Tylenol. So Skye drops by her old dealer, Lewis’s (Lukas Gage) place, to find some Vicodin. Just for the pain. Just for the tour. Probably. But she never gets her hands on any pills, since Lewis is clearly losing his mind. Skye assumes he’s just having a weird reaction from dipping into his own supply – until he freezes up, cracks a big smile, and tears his own face off with an exercise weight, smiling and staring all the while.

That experience was terrifying, but Skye’s problems are just beginning. Things are happening which don’t make any sense, people are acting strangely, and she’s seeing the same awful smile on complete strangers and close friends. With the pressure of the tour mounting, Skye feels like she’s cracking up - until she gets a mysterious text from an unknown number, telling her they know exactly what’s going on…

This is exactly where this movie started annoying me. Much like the first one, the sequel is very cleverly put together. The technical filmmaking squeezes some great scares out of the material, but the material is patently goofy. The main plot is the weakest part of the movie by far, and that’s where this sequel outshines the original: This entry is much more focused on Skye’s increasing delusion, taking the audience on a high-pressure rollercoaster of a mental breakdown. Every time the actual antagonist buts in, the story gets almost cartoonish. The audience in my screening was laughing nearly as much as they were gasping. More laughing at than laughing with, but there was some of both.

Audiences are going to be further discouraged by the staggering content concerns. There was so much swearing that at one point in my notebook, it just says “I give up”, at which point the swear count starts going up in increments of five. If I took the time to jot every single one down, I wouldn’t have spent any time looking at the screen for huge portions of the film. Then there’s the exceptionally graphic and phenomenally gruesome violence. And drug use. But for genre fans who can put up with the absolute trash fire that is the main plot and take the clever filmmaking as it comes, this horror sequel provides a sharp little jolt of adrenaline.