Review: 'Smile 2,' with Naomi Scott's dynamic turn as a tormented pop idol, puts the staging of gore ahead of a plotline that's ploddingly predictable

In 2022’s “Smile” and now in the sequel, “Smile 2,” director Parker Finn shows he has the smarts to deliver chilling scenes of horror tension and the stomach to stage some effectively disgusting bits of gore.

Now if Finn could overcome the plot excesses and leaps of illogic of the franchise’s scripts — which he wrote. 

The sequel picks up six days after the first “Smile” ended, with that movie’s lone survivor, New Jersey police detective Joel (Kyle Gallner). As the first movie established, there’s an evil spirit of some kind that feasts parasitically on a person, and when that person has given up everything the spirit wants, that evil makes the host kill themselves in the messiest way possible and in front of a witness — who then becomes the next host, going mad until they kill themselves in front of someone else and keeping the streak alive.

Joel figured out the daisy chain of horrific death, but not before becoming infected himself. His plan, in the sequel’s opening sequence, involves trying to pass the evil parasite on to a skeevy drug kingpin, who presumably will off himself and infect other criminal scum. This doesn’t exactly go as planned, and the next victim turns out to be a minor drug dealer, Lewis (Lukas Gage). 

Finn then cuts to a different character: Skye Riley (played by Naomi Scott), a pop star who’s preparing for her next world tour — after being away from performing for the last year, going through rehab for alcohol and cocaine addictions, and healing from the car crash that also killed her movie-star boyfriend, Paul Hudson (Ray Nicholson). 

While going through the stress of rehearsals for her first concert, and accepting the tough-love care of her mother/manager (Rosemarie DeWitt). Skye is still dealing with back pain from her accident. She aims to score some Vicodin from a drug dealer she knows — her high school acquaintance, Lewis.

When Skye goes to see Lewis, he’s ridiculously paranoid, seeing things that aren’t there and screaming. Then the screaming stops and Lewis suddenly has a maniacal, Joker-like smile on his face. Then he bashes his own head in with a barbell weight. And, just like that, Skye becomes the next person to be trapped in the curse.

Skye starts seeing people displaying maniacal grins everywhere, and is sure that she’s going nuts. Not even the intercession of her mom, her assistant (Miles Gutierrez-Riley), her record label’s boss (Raúl Castillo) or her estranged best friend, Gemma (Dylan Gelula) seem to cut through the terror Skye is experiencing.

The reason nothing penetrates in “Smile 2” is that, in all the jump scares of Finn’s script, everything is happening in her head. The familiar plot device is handy because it allows the audience to see the most terrifying things Finn can imagine and bring to the screen, and that part of his imagine is fertile indeed. The best set piece involves demonic versions of Skye’s dance crew converging on her, like a disturbing game of “Red Light, Green Light.” 

The problem is that watching the movie devolves into a simple guessing game — is this part real or in her head? — that often becomes predictable, which is the worst thing a horror thriller can be. That said, the conclusion is bat-crap crazy, in a good way.

The main thing that breaks up the script’s plodding expectations are Skye’s rehearsal scenes, which allow Finn to sneak some musical numbers into the mix. (What is happening with thrillers and horror movies this year, like “Joker: Folie À Deux,” secretly being musicals?) If Skye Riley ever opened on tour for Lady Raven, the pop icon at the center of M. Night Shyamalan’s “Trap,” I would try to buy tickets until the vendor’s website crashed.

Scott — who played Jasmine in the live-action “Aladdin,” and was strong in Elizabeth Banks’ unfairly maligned “Charlie’s Angels” reboot — is compelling here, giving the tormented Skye a ferocious determination not to be sucked down by these evil forces. If she could apply that spark to breaking free of Finn’s tedious storyline, “Smile 2” could have been a horror thriller worth smiling about.

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‘Smile 2’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, October 18, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for strong bloody violent content, grisly images, language throughout and drug use. Running time: 127 minutes.