(photo: my own photo - in fact screesnot - in the darkness of theater "Tuckwood" /Serbian undertexts/)
„SMILE 2“ (2024 American movie)
Dir.: Parker Finn; with: Naomi Scott, Rosemary DeWitt, Lucas Gage, Dylan Gelula, Peter Jacobson,
The critics must have some issue with Parker Finn, since they simply don't like him, they don't even know how to explain exactly what is bothering them, but can only write "he wanted too much", "he was repetitive, he didn't build on that short film of his"... They criticized the first film for only spinning one and the same premise, and now, when he has made the story more complicated and ad layers with two subtypes of horror – pillomaniac and psychiatric – and added the deconstruction of the pop star's loneliness and their cruel entourage, and then, again, according the critics he is now "overambitious".
Unlike Damien Leoni, who is a low budget butcher for Third World, Parker Finn is a child of the big city and sets the story in the hustle and bustle of Gotham's discos, concert halls and expensive hotels. Plus one more or less intellectual thread, which could have even given everything a kind of realistic thread.
By obfuscating that pattern with the media scene and narcotics and perhaps hereditary madness, he gave himself an opportunity to secure another sequel ---> an open ending in which Skye Riley (Naomi Scott), a semi-rehabilitated teenage star, smiles from the stage to the horrified (both diegetic and hopefully contingent viewers in theaters) audience.
The film begins with a telop: "6 days later". The opening scene, in a cold, wintery wolf's den, shows a policeman who knows what is going on, and before that fatal seventh day he plans to break into a cabin where two dealers are and to kill so that the "smile" can enter into the other. He by mistake kills both of them in the exchange of fire. He already thought that the "smile" was going to screw him, when there was Lewis Fregoli (Lucas Gage), a dealer at the bottom of the food chain, who happened to be in the cabin and it was him who was screwed up...
It seems to be the fashion in Hollywood films to have such a smart prologues which, like in Brannagh's Poirots, are often better than the rest of the films...
Then there is a cut and here we are in New York where the rehabilitated Skye Riley (Naomi Scott) is preparing for a new tour after full (haha) physical and mental recovery. She is training aerobic for dancing numbers, drinks only bottled water and eats brown rice with broccoli. But the old wounds hurt, and she went to her old friend, the dealer, to buy „Vicodin“ on black market because no one will give a prescription to a former drug addict even for a bottle of aspirin any more. And that friend is the poor guy from the beginning: Lewis Fregoli...
The plot is now taking its own old course... Naomi Scott really acted a lot in the movie, she suffers both mentally, in her heart and physically, at the end she walks on broken bottles by her bare feet, she runs away and escapes into a jeep. There is her only supporter. Old friend Gemma (Dylan Gelula), whilst everyone else, from the manager via stylist, to the head of the campaign, her own mother (Rosemary DeWitt) --> just wants to milk her and constantly command her and suspect that she has become a drug addict again.
Well, there is another soul who could be with her, a former male medical nurse, who, ironically, is played by a doctor from "Dr. House" – that is Peter Jacobson in the role he is educated for.
We see a series of harrowing, humiliating and terrifying situations for Skye Riley, from the snobbery at a charity event, through fatal smiles from both her own mother and aforementioned best friend (who would have thought?!), until the final showdown in a "Pizza Hut" refrigerator store, and it has to be just there, because the medical nurse Maurice (Jacobson) has an ingenious plan, borrowed from the movie "The Rock", with Nicolas Cage, directed by Michael Bay: namely, the medical nurse will give her an injection of I don't know what and then her heart will stop for 2 minutes, and that's how long "smile" can live before it enters another human. Otherwise it dies without a living recipient, like a vampyre under the ligth. An the refrigeartor is needed also for preventing her from getting brain damaged...!? That Jacobson guy is reasoning like Medical Ph.D, not just a nurse...
There will certainly be a sequel, probably with Naomi Scott, and I expect Peter Jacobson as well, who somehow disappeared at the end of the film. Maybe by then he'll graduate in medicine at night school and finally get a medical degree.
There is something Batmanish in this film, all those buildings whose columns are stuck in the black waters of New York are sinister and cold, those thick walls of concrete and steel and marble are repulsive, and with huge panoramic windows through which you can see fireplaces that do not warm anyone and – empty and eeriiy clean – marble floors, soulless furniture, without a single book, notebook, pencil or a carpet, only giant plasma television sets, and that night, cold exterior with windows that are not inviting a single honest and poor soul to enter and warm up, it is a post-apocalyptic vision of the world, perhaps this is real story for Rushdie to write about it (he already has one such novel) or for Coppola to make a film (he also has one such film), it is a dead empire created on the black ashes of fossil fuels, which is maintained on cerosene–fueled electric generators and lithium batteries, surrounded by Praetorians and accessible only to the super-rich. Those buildings were built by modern Egyptian slaves, Eastern European bricklayers, artisans of forgotten trades, illegal immigrants, Midwestern masters of their trades who no longer live in their houses surrounded by wooden fences and flowery gardens, those buildings are maintained by dreary and tired janitors, defects are repaired by handymen who barely know English, bums sleep and freeze next to dumpsters on the edge of rich neighborhoods, that's an empire for a million of the richest, and the rest of us can't even hope for a scrap now when we are no longer young, so we are neither suitable for toiling, nor enough pretty to suck cocks and dance on a pole, so then all we have can do is to wrap ourselves in a dirty blanket and doze lethargically next to a barrel in which a fire is lit on a New York street in the winter, this world has gone to hell, we will live alternately in the sun toasting and in the polar cold, we will age even faster, and yet with undiminished longing we will look into these large illuminated windows on marble buildings, and we won't have any camera cranes to zoom in on the also weeping rich people, dazed by Chardonnay, in a yoga position by the fire with cell phones or laptops on their laps. This world is out of joint, there are fewer and fewer free citizens, fewer and fewer hired hard workers who can recover after a day's work, there are more and more debt slaves, useless unemployed and „unusable“ people, who world should be got rid of, or at least kept at a safe distance from the walls of rich people's homes. I don't have access to this world, not even to a "Pizza Hat" joint. I'll soon be so old and sick that I won't even be able to be a gardener.
That being said, Skye Riley's plights couldn't interest me less.
"Terrifier" is a slaughterhouse for the poor, "Smile" for Bill Gates and Bezos and Musk and Zuckerberg and pro–vaxxers.
