Happy Death Day 2U Expands on a Great Premise, Then Ruins It

Tom Philip
This is neither the sequel we were expecting nor the one we wanted.

One of the better microbudget genre delights of the past few years was Happy Death Day, a Groundhog Day-esque slasher in which Tree Gelbman (a revelatory Jessica Rothe) is murdered over and over again by a masked assailant on her birthday, waking up each time with the day reset until she's able to solve her own murder. With a budget of roughly $5 million and a box office haul of well over $150 million, a sequel was quickly greenlit—and honestly, maybe a little too quickly, if the manic, scattershot Happy Death Day 2U is anything to go by.

At first glance, Happy Death Day 2U appears to head in a welcome new direction: We follow Ryan, a bit player in the first movie, on the day after Tree's ordeal, after she's successfully closed the loop. He's working on a mysterious science project with a couple of friends; once they leave to grab some cafeteria churros, Ryan is suddenly dispatched by a knife-wielding killer in that baby mask, the one we've all come to know and hate. He wakes up with the day reset, and, boom, here we go again. Except not quite.

One more creatively-devised horror scene later, and the film's tone and direction veer wildly down an entirely unwelcome road. Essentially every horror angle is jettisoned in favor of a goofy sci-fi caper as Tree is thrust back into her loop, only in an alternate reality. This time, her boyfriend is instead dating her best friend, the masked killer stalking her is someone different from who it was in the first movie, and—big fun twist time!—her mom is alive in this universe.

The sudden hit of sentimentality is nothing but a frustrating retread of the first movie, when Tree came to terms with her mother's death and finally opened up to her dad. What's more, the ill-devised cause for the loops is revealed in a hilariously clunky fashion and answers a question no one was really clamoring to ask. The reveal may open new doors for additional sequels and opportunities down the line, but it also does a disservice to Tree's arc, making the first film's focused story suddenly that much more impersonal.

Thank god, then, for Jessica Rothe's continued enthusiastic participation. She's director Christopher Landon's not-so-secret weapon, asked to carry pretty much everything that actually works in this film. Tree is once again subjected to a Looney Tunes-style montage of outlandish deaths, and once again has to anchor the film emotionally. She excels at both, even in a much more crowded movie.

At 100 minutes, Happy Death Day 2U doesn't outstay its welcome; instead, it comes astoundingly close during what is, by modern standards, a fairly brief movie. As the film's ambitions and mythology expand it more and more into the bloated mess it becomes in the final 30 minutes, it's hard to imagine Landon had as much time as he might have wanted to make this damn movie. No idea seems to have been left behind, no dumb joke cut (or rewritten to be a little funnier). Amidst the chaos of the ticking-clock ending, an out-of-nowhere heist becomes the focus of the story for no good reason, adding a new eye-rolling comedy sequence to a film already bursting at the seams, and wasting roughly 15 minutes of time that could have been put to better use in literally every way. If it's possible to be both slapdash and try-hard, Happy Death Day 2U has discovered that alchemy.

Of course, everything must end, and ends fairly neatly. A requisite mid-credits sequence sets up new possibilities for a full-blown franchise, and leaves those of us who wanted more Happy Death Day in the first place wondering if, were we able to reset the day, we might be more careful what we wish for.