The second film in the new Halloween trilogy has finally been released after being delayed for almost exactly a year due to the ongoing pandemic. After the return of Michael Meyers in 2018's Halloween was a bigger success than expected, both critically and at the box office, this was a highly anticipated movie. While it doesn't quite live up to its predecessor, it delivers on most of the things people should expect from a Halloween movie.
This movie picks up exactly where the last one left off. Halloween 2018 brought back Jamie Lee Curtis as her iconic role of Laurie Strode, 40 years after the original movie. All other sequels are now retconned. Laurie's daughter and granddaughter serve as other main characters, putting three generations of strong women in the spotlight. Of course on Halloween night, Michael Myers escapes from his prison facility and is wreaking havoc on Haddonfield. Though Halloween ended with the audience thinking Laurie and her family had finally destroyed Michael for good, Halloween Kills shows he was just getting started.
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Those who just want to see Michael Myers massacring the residents of Haddonfield, and those who have a lot of extra nostalgia for the original film, will like this movie. It's a lot of Michael causing carnage. Those who are looking for a great story and good characters to get invested in, and those who are looking for a technically great movie to match Halloween 1978 or Halloween 2018, will probably be disappointed.
The violence in Halloween Kills seems to be its focus. For fans of Michael Myers who want to see him kill a lot of people in a lot of disgusting ways, this movie will be a hit! For the most part, the gore in this film is done really well. The kills are intense and creative, with a lot of blood and guts. It's probably the most brutal Halloween movie and it's full of action. With that comes pacing that is pretty fast, making the movie go by fast despite its almost two-hour runtime. Michael himself also looks incredible. He is scary and strong, and this might be the best version of his infamous mask yet.
While there are a lot of fun ideas at play here and watching Michael just do what he does is a lot of fun, the visuals themselves aren't perfect. This is all set at nighttime and therefore, it's dark. That makes sense. However, some of the violence is shot in a way where the literal darkness actually takes over "the good stuff" and it's hard to see. This doesn't make it overwhelmingly abstract or anything like that, but it's worth noting. Some might prefer that it makes it all look a bit more rough and grungey, but it does mean the audience doesn't get to see all the blood and gore that they might want.
The characters, the Strode women, in particular, are another highlight of Halloween Kills. They're underutilized because they have basically no scenes all together in one place, but they're still great. It's real, non-cheesy, female empowerment to see all of these strong women kick so much butt and seem so fearless in the wake of their Boogeyman, the person who traumatized their family. It puts a new spin on the title of "Final Girl" and that'll be appealing to a lot of people. Women especially, but other genders too.
The biggest element letting Halloween Kills down is its script. This script ranges from goofy and awkward to just plain bad at some moments, and it's kind of distracting. New characters to this movie feel really strange, especially Anthony Michael Hall's Tommy and Kyle Richards's Lindsay. They're fun additions because of their ties to the original movie, but what they did with them in Halloween Kills was so strange and their acting performances were really lacking. The town and the people of Haddonfield, in general, became so strange and cheesy, eventually forming a mob reminiscent of the townspeople in Beauty and the Beast. Having them all stand in the hospital shouting "EVIL DIES TONIGHT!" was, to put it bluntly, strange and completely corny.
Those aspects of the movie combined with some of the overwhelming cheesy lines and plot points make Halloween Kills feel a little lost. Part of that might be simply because this is a middle film of a trilogy. Halloween 2018 introduced all of these great characters and caught audiences up to where Laurie and Michael are now. Hopefully, Halloween Ends in 2022 will provide a beautiful conclusion. Halloween Kills though, feels a little lost and a little too much like a filler/transition film. The idea of the town and the people wronged by Michael in the past coming together to defeat him is cool, but it's only half fleshed out and feels unimportant.
A more effective approach might have been to just really focus this movie on Michael and his kills. Make it fully gross and fully brutal. They did this in a way, but there was also an attempt to add a lot of plot progression without a ton of delivery. Most of the actual plot development was already seen in the trailer. The trailer had already had a lot of scrutiny behind it before the movie even came out because people felt it might reveal too much, and they were right.
Halloween Kills is by no means a failure of a movie. It's perfectly entertaining, looks beautiful, and emanates Halloween and October vibes. Does it stand out or bring anything particularly new to the table though? Not really. A lot of people will love this, and a lot of people will hate it. Besides providing some mini-commentary on trauma and mob mentality, there isn't too much under the surface. While not everything has to be deep and meaningful to have value, this movie feels like it's just missing that bit of something. At the end of the day, this is likely to be the forgotten middle movie of the franchise that doesn't suck, but isn't the favorite either.
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