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'Smile 2' Nicely Targets Pop Star Fame with the Terrific Naomi Scott

This image released by Paramount Pictures shows Naomi Scott in a scene from "Smile 2." (Paramount Pictures via AP)
This image released by Paramount Pictures shows Naomi Scott in a scene from "Smile 2." (Paramount Pictures via AP)
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'Smile 2' Nicely Targets Pop Star Fame with the Terrific Naomi Scott

This image released by Paramount Pictures shows Naomi Scott in a scene from "Smile 2." (Paramount Pictures via AP)
This image released by Paramount Pictures shows Naomi Scott in a scene from "Smile 2." (Paramount Pictures via AP)

In an early scene in “Smile 2,” the fictional pop superstar Skye Riley is in her drug dealer's apartment. “Do you believe in weird stuff?” he asks her, between doing lines of coke.
You certainly will after this horror romp — writer-director Parker Finn's second movie that suddenly opens up the franchise with the promises of multiple directions in the future. Not for that drug dealer, though: He soon smiles at her demonically as he repeatedly slams a 35-pound gym weight into his head, making it hamburger, The Associated Press said.
“Smile 2” lands as unsettling grins are plastered on pumpkins and politicians alike as we approach Halloween and Election Day, and the psychotic, overly made-up leads of “Joker: Folie à Deux” have been putting up a brave face at their terrible box-office numbers.
So it's the perfect time for a sequel to 2020's “Smile,” which bridged the gap between elevated art horror and straight-out, unapologetic slasher. Finn this time takes on fame, a better tonal fit than the generational trauma of the first. It's a meditation on breakdowns in the public eye, with a side dish of body horror.
We start six days after the last movie but they are barely connected — a single character for a few minutes — as we watch a demon that forces its victims to smile before meeting a gruesome end working its way into the low-level drug game.
The evil entity will eventually glom onto our heroine, Skye, a fictional Grammy-winning pop superstar akin to if Lady Gaga and Miley Cyrus had a baby. We meet her a year after a horrific car crash she was in that killed her famous boyfriend and left her with a Vicodin addiction and rumors about whether she had anything to do with it. That drug dealer has now infected Skye, but she has no idea what's in store (or in score, the terrific work of Cristobal Tapia de Veer).
One thing to really beam about is leading lady Naomi Scott going for it all-out, all snot, smeared blood and wide-eyed, full on-fear. Scott manages to pour her humanity into the part — diva, whimpering, defiant, strung out, panicked. She even sings on the soundtrack — songs that are credible hits.
The smile demon collides with Skye as she's about to launch a comeback tour and the pressure is on. Finn is at his best here, mocking confessional TV interviews — a Drew Barrymore cameo, a nice touch — full of self-work and apologies: “I let you down and I promise this will never happen again.” Her management demands that she show up “smile and read from the teleprompter.” Skye's mom — on the payroll — is little help: “You need to stay hydrated,” she tells her after Skye is clearly in torment.
Finn has become a much more assured filmmaker and uses humor so well here, from nasty gangsters enjoying pumpkin Frappuccinos to our heroine Googling “Does vomit have DNA?” He's still fond of jump-scares and blood spurting and gross-out tricks, like a body dragged by a truck until it's just a smear with entrails. One delightful moment has Skye chased by demonic backup dancers, a Bob Fosse-meets-"Thriller" sequence.
Finn also has a ball putting his heroines into cringe-worthy situations. In the first movie, a murdered cat got bundled into a kid’s birthday present. In this one, it's a impromptu speech in front of music industry types that goes horrifically off the rails. He's got a deeper target: How do we quiet those voices in our heads that say we're no good?
Finn's script sometime lags as he searches for an ending for “Smile 2,” seemingly in two minds, before basically delivering both, kicking up dream sequences and alternate timelines like a squid pumping out ink to cover its tracks. Over two hours ends up being too long.
But he has found a great satirical target, given life to a third film easily and showcased another rising star to watch. That's a reason to, well, smile about.
“Smile 2,” a Paramount Pictures release that lands in movie theaters on Friday, is rated R for “strong bloody violent content, grisly images, language throughout and drug use.” Running time: 127 minutes. Three stars out of four.

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Cate Blanchett Wants You to Laugh at Politics in ‘Rumours’

Cate Blanchett poses for photographers upon arrival at the premiere of the film "Rumours" during the London Film Festival on Sunday, Oct. 13, 2024, in London. (AP)
Cate Blanchett poses for photographers upon arrival at the premiere of the film "Rumours" during the London Film Festival on Sunday, Oct. 13, 2024, in London. (AP)
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Cate Blanchett Wants You to Laugh at Politics in ‘Rumours’

Cate Blanchett poses for photographers upon arrival at the premiere of the film "Rumours" during the London Film Festival on Sunday, Oct. 13, 2024, in London. (AP)
Cate Blanchett poses for photographers upon arrival at the premiere of the film "Rumours" during the London Film Festival on Sunday, Oct. 13, 2024, in London. (AP)

You’d be hard pressed to find an upcoming film weirder than “Rumours.”

The biting commentary on the emptiness of political statements and the performances politicians put on starts off as a straight political satire focusing on the G7 world leaders, but then slips into a world of slow-yet-terrifying zombies; a mysterious, giant brain found in the middle of a forest with unexplained origins; and an AI chatbot bent on entrapment.

It goes from provocative to absurd within a few short scenes, with the G7 leaders no longer the subject of criticism, but the butt of the joke.

And that’s kind of the whole point, according to its star and executive producer, Cate Blanchett.

“We’re all in such a state of heightened anxiety and fear with what’s going on with climate, what’s going on with the global political situation. We feel like we’re on the precipice of a world war and there’s a lot of people in positions of power who seem to be relishing that moment,” Blanchett told The Associated Press.

She plays a fictional chancellor of Germany named Hilda Orlmann, the host of the conference who's more focused on optics than action.

“I think the audience will come to it with a need for some kind of catharsis. And because the film is ridiculous and terrifying ... I think they’ll be able to laugh at the absurdity of the situation we found ourselves in. I think it’s a very generous film in that way,” she said.

The three directors, Guy Maddin and brothers Evan and Galen Johnson, said they wanted the film to feel like it had a “generic wash of political disrespect” and to include some resonant critiques, but they didn’t want viewers to feel like they were leaving a lecture hall as they walked out of the theater.

“I’m preachy enough when I talk to people. I don’t want to make a movie that’s preachy, you know? I just favor movies that aren’t that. That just hit me with a little mystery of ... ‘What are you doing or seeing? What am I experiencing?’” Evan Johnson, who wrote the script, as well as co-directed, said.

As for the more absurd plotlines, Maddin said he and his collaborators share “a compulsion to come up with an original recipe.”

And original it certainly is. In its straightforward opening act, leaders from the Group of 7 meet for their annual summit and try to draft a provisional statement for an unnamed crisis. Then, as the evening goes on and they struggle to string together a couple, meaningful sentences, they find themselves abandoned and subject to attack from “bog people,” or well-preserved mummified bodies from thousands of years ago. Hijinks — and hilarity — ensue from there.

Nikki Amuka-Bird, who plays the fictionalized British Prime Minister Cardosa Dewindt, said that while reading the script, she kept asking herself, “What’s happening?” But the ridiculous plotline — including the apocalyptic invasion of zombie-like “bog people” — was only part of the reason why she took on the project.

“This kind of total courage to genre splice in this way takes away any kind of apprehension or fear you might have about it because their (the directors’) tongues are firmly in their cheeks the whole time,” Amuka-Bird said. “It’s a really imaginative exercise and it’s just fantastic to work with directors who can be that bold and take chances like that.”

The cast is rounded out by a starry ensemble: Roy Dupuis is a melodramatic Canadian prime minister, Charles Dance is an American president with an inexplicable British accent, Denis Ménochet is a paranoid French president and Alicia Vikander makes an appearance as a frenetic leader from the European Commission.

The title of the movie, Blanchett said, is meant to invoke the revered Fleetwood Mac album of the same name, which was made at a time when the bandmembers were reportedly “all sleeping together and bickering and breaking up,” she said.

“What was surprising about it is you think, ‘OK, this is a film about the G7,’ but it’s like a sort of a daytime soap opera with these sort of trysts and liaisons and petty squabbles,” Blanchett said. “It was such an unusual way to look at the mess we’re all in and the leadership that’s led us here.”