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Smile 2’s Ideas Are Scarier Than the Movie Itself

What starts off as a thoughtful thriller set in the world of pop stardom winds up mired in the usual horror-movie clichés.

The film follows a few days in the life of global pop icon Skye Riley (Naomi Scott), who is returning to performing after a period in rehab and a lengthy hiatus due to a gruesome car crash that scarred her and killed her actor boyfriend Paul (Ray Nicholson). A world in which other people’s smiles became monstrous threats was a brilliant visual idea, one of both eerie immediacy and symbolic charge, but the movie eventually lost itself amid the predictable requirements of a genre picture. And yet while Scott’s appropriately freaked-out performance helps, the film never quite manages to make us care for Skye, in part because she’s a victim right from the start and things never settle down long enough for us to get any sense of her as a character.

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