It Chapter 2 Failed Richie & Eddie

Despite Bill Hader's career best performance, the Stephen King sequel It Chapter 2 falls short when it comes to the story of Eddie and Richie.

It Chapter 2 deserved the praise the movie received for Bill Hader’s performance as Richie Tozier, but the turn is wasted on a sequel that lets down the character and his relationship with Eddie. Stephen King’s ongoing reign as the crown prince of literary horror began in 1974 with the release of his bestseller Carrie, which was soon adapted into a Brian DePalma-directed shocker two years later (and repeatedly remade since, to diminishing returns). Since then, King’s career has been one of highs and lows, and for every stellar adaptation of his work like The Shining, there is a movie that earns a critical drubbing like 2003’s scattered sci-fi horror Dreamcatcher.

In some cases, like the two-part adaptation of King’s doorstopper It, a divided critical reception can be split between two halves of the same story. While its 2017 predecessor It Chapter 1 was acclaimed for its careful balance of 80s nostalgia, solid scares, and coming-of-age dramedy, the sequel Chapter 2 was met with less enthusiastic reviews upon release. Like Tim Curry’s miniseries version of Pennywise, It Chapter 2 endeavored to be funny and scary at once.

Unfortunately, unlike that iconic performance, the balance was off for many critics. The sequel was not without its high points, though, and It Chapter 2 was deservedly lauded for Bill Hader’s revelatory turn as Richie Tozier, the closeted adult Loser’s club member who is in love with childhood best friend Eddie. However, while Hader’s performance earned acclaim, the turn is lost in a movie that fails to do justice to the pair’s story.

Richie Never Comes Out In It Chapter 2

LGBTQ+ love stories are as diverse as their heterosexual counterparts, and as such, a queer love story doesn't need to feature characters explicitly outing themselves or discussing their sexuality. However, unlike the somewhat idealized 1980s of the King-influenced Stranger Things, It's two-part movie adaptation endeavors to addresses the small-town homophobia that was rife in America at the time, and depicting Richie as a successful entertainer who left his rural home in favor of a large metropolitan city makes it harder for the sequel to make sense of his closeted status. As one Hollywood Reporter opinion piece noted after the release of It Chapter 2, the adaptation’s time shift changes the historical context of Richie’s character and makes his closeted status more out-of-character than that of his novel counterpart, particularly when the movie doesn’t attempt to address his decision not to come out.

The novel’s version of Richie never refers to himself as gay, but this is more than understandable when the novel’s early half is set during the ‘50s while the latter half takes place in the ‘80s. Like Kubrick’s take on The Shining, the movie adaptation of It changes a lot of the original text, and as a gay man who grew up at the height of the AIDS epidemic and is a successful entertainer in the 2010s, Chapter 2’s version of Richie is someone who likely would have come out to at least his closest friends, if not the world at large. There is a possibility that working as a stand-up comedian (an industry that has been plagued by homophobia controversies over the decades) means Richie feels he can’t come out, but It Chapter 2 never explores this issue. Instead, it opts to paper over the question and leaves Richie’s orientation ambiguous in a choice that makes the movie’s love story less clear and involving.

Eddie’s It Chapter 2 Wife Is A Joke

Understandably, the Stephen King adaptation needed to cut a lot to fit its (already overlong) 3-hour runtime, but It Chapter 2’s decision to sideline the internal life of Eddie comes at the expense of his and Richie’s shared story. Despite the object of Richie’s apparent affections Eddie being one of the primary characters of Chapter 2, almost no screen time is devoted to Eddie’s relationship with Richie, and his wife is a joke. Quite literally, since she is played in a tiny cameo by the actor who played his mother in the original, and that's the extent of the insight viewers get into Eddie’s romantic life.

There is no exploration of why the hypochondriac married a domineering woman identical to his mother, and his relationship with Bill Hader's Richie (i.e how reciprocal Richie’s attraction is) is left frustratingly ambiguous. The lack of insight into Eddie’s motivations makes Richie’s love story thin and uninvolving despite Hader’s superb work. This issue is worsened by the fact that Eddie’s adult actor, James Ransome, is more than up to the task of navigating this potentially tricky, poignant emotional territory if given the requisite material. Instead, he plays comic relief for much of the story and has little to do beyond being perpetually scared.

It Chapter 2’s Opening Scene Promised Better

Seemingly dropped in from an earlier, darker version of the movie, It Chapter 2’s controversial opening scene promises the following sequel will not shy away from frank, unsparing discussions of queer oppression, depicting homophobia and its ill effects. The brutal death of Xavier Dolan’s Adrian Mellon is the most upsetting sequence in either It film, but despite the sequel needing to address these issues to justify such an intense, brutal sequence, it instead proceeds to forget this in favor of a lighter, sillier follow-up to the original.

One scene wherein Richie applauds Stan’s triumphant speech at his bar mitzvah is the sort of moving moment that could instead have been shared by Eddie and Richie (with Eddie being the character defined by his constant fear). A later encounter with town bully Henry Bowers could also have seen Eddie either stand up for or sympathize with Richie instead of being absent from the important flashback. Making It Chapter 2 a lighter, more fun sequel could have been fine if the movie did not continually feature numerous hints at a moving, tragic love story that goes largely untold in the finished film, and did not open on a gruesome scene whose purpose is never made clear when the sequel's gay love story is told only in ambiguous terms.

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