Back in 2017, Christopher Landon and Blumhouse teamed to take the teen savvy world of Scream and the concept behind 90s comedy, Groundhog Day and get them to canoodle in the bridal suite of a cheap motel until their union gave birth to a little meta baby. That baby was named Happy Death Day and thanks to some energetic direction and a central performance by Jessica Rothe that managed to ground the crazed proceedings, it proved to be something of a surprisingly fun outing that fully delved into it’s time warping plot. Ooooor did it….?
That’s right, only two years later, Landon dutifully delivered Happy Death Day 2U which took an already twisty, turny concept and then complicated it even more by dropping the fucking multiverse into matters. In one fell swoop, Landon had taken his Wes Craven/Harold Ramis mixture and then added a huge dollop of Robert Zemeckis to it for good measure in order to create a Back To The Future Part II sized paradox for the ages – but does Happy Death Day 2U’s decision to go Quantum overturn an already complex boat? For the second time, let’s start over again.
After her experience with a timeloop saw Tree Gelbman inconveniently recreate her birthday over and over again until she stoped getting murdered, caught her own killer and became a nicer person to boot, she finally wakes up a day later in the dorm room of Carter Davis to finally move on with her life – however, others don’t seem to be so lucky. Remember Ryan? Carter’s roommate who was pissed that he had to sleep on his car due to Tree being in his room? Well he’s now having a rather disconcerting date with deja vu after waking up and experiencing the exact same morning after being stabbed by a baby-masked killer later in the day. Worse yet, it seems that due to his experiments with his quantum reactor he dubbed Sisy, he was the one who inadvertently shoved Tree into her own personal timeloop and now it’s shifted over to him.
After breaking after only a single day of reliving the 19th of October, Tree recognises the types of events that Ryan is panicking about and soon discovers that it was Sisy, not divine intervention that set her on her sci-fi/slasher path of redemption – however, after trying to sort out Ryan’s Quantum issue, the Dean of the college arrives to shut the disruptive experiment down with chaotic results. Tree then wakes back in disturbingly familiar territory which proves to be Carter’s dorm room on the morning of September 18th – this can mean only one this: she’s back in her time loop once again… only she isn’t. She’s reliving the same day over and over again, only this time she’s in another dimension which means all of the previous rules have flown out the Quantum window. But if the killer is different and the status quo is different, how can Tree possibly get back to both her own time and dimension?
With the addition of some extra paradoxes and a whole bunch of multiversal shenanigans (long before the MCU went hog wild on it), you certainly can’t accuse Happy Death Day 2U of resting on its laurels, but Landon’s attempts to make his horror comedy even more ambitious is in danger of overloading. In fact, during the effort to try and wrestle a hyper-complex plot into a position where the previous energy and humour isn’t crushed to death by the neccessity to make everything still make sense. Landon also sets himself a rather insurmountable task of trying to cram everything into a lean, hour and forty runtime with gives minimal space to maneuver which the script tries to alleviate by hitting the ground running and diving straight in. This obviously means that if you missed the first Death Day, you got next to no chance of keeping up despite the inclusion of an amusingly speedy recap and the added feature of running gags carried over from the original doesn’t particularly help either.
Worse yet, the introduction of a science fiction explanation of what happened in the first film actually serves to make things less fun and in turn, shoves the entire genre the original film played in out of the realms of horror comedy. This results in the slasher stuff feeling decidedly out of place despite it previously being a huge aspect and the science stuff it’s replaced with isn’t anywhere near as entertaining.
It also doesn’t help that a lot of the new or expanded characters aren’t particularly funny. Phi Vu’s Ryan, Sarah Yarkin’s Dre and Suraj Sharma’s Samar all deliver their one liners with aplomb, but we’re under no illusions that these guys are only here to facilitate some narrative heavy lifting in order to make things work. So with the story overcomplicated, the jokes not as funny and the slasher aspect reduced to a sidebar, how have I given Happy Death Day 2U a generous sounding three stars? Simple: Jessica fucking Rothe. While she’s admittedly given less chance to shine in this one, primarily because Ryan’s the intital focus, she still manages to step in and tirelessly props up any place where the plot is crumbling by once again going as had as she can with her gloriously ego free performance. While some of the “death montages” are a little suspect this time around (if she knows that too many deaths can kill her, why does Tree look so gleeful when she resets her day by throwing a hairdryer in the bath, glugs drain cleaner, or dives out of an airplane without clothes or a parachute?), her all-in attitude manages to sell everything from the emotional (her family situation has shifted in this new universe), to the action orientated and she remains a rock even when Landon’s perky tone can’t sustain the weight of his ambition.
Still, even though I’ve sounded like I’m extremely down on this sequel, I’m only being so harsh because I found the first film a wonderful breath of fresh air. However, while the follow up struggles to equal that breezy fun while it labours to set up the universe it’s set in (literally), that doesn’t mean that it’s not a goofily sweet romp that’s trying to rub some Marty McFly onto its existing premice. In fact, at the time of writing, there still hasn’t been a third go-round for the Happy Death Day series which I genuinely believe is a legitimate crime. With the science of both a time loop and the multiverse now explained, Landon potentially could hit the ground running in order to deliver on the promise offered up by a post credits sting while bringing some of the slasher element back into play.
It’s tough to hate a sequel that stumbles due to overachievement and thankfully Happy Death Day 2U still contains enough high points to carry it through the joke sapping science bits and flat side characters. But if we ever get a third entry, Landon needs to get his balancing act in order if he wants us to celebrate another death day…
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