TORONTO — Insidious Chapter 2 comes two years after the original, which scared up a respectable $97 million worldwide.
Like the first, it’s directed by James Wan (Saw, The Conjuring) and stars Patrick Wilson, Rose Byrne and Barbara Hershey.
Insidious Chapter 2 focuses on the Lambert family as they try to uncover the secret to their connection to the spirit world with the help of a trio of ghost hunters.
Here’s a look at what some critics are saying about the sequel.
“Insidious: Chapter 2 picks up the story at the very moment we left it, and expects its audience to have a detailed understanding of that first film’s characters and rulebook,” wrote Robbie Collin of The Telegraph. “Anyone who does might feel a pang of disappointment that the plot is even feebler this time, and becomes slightly bogged down as Renai, her mother-in-law and a team of ghost-hunters engage in some Scooby-Doo-like detective work. But the scares are mostly very scary indeed, and that means the film does its job.”
Commenting on its “seat-clenching scares,” Variety‘s Scott Foundas called the movie “a modestly scaled and highly pleasurable sequel … that should have genre fans begging for thirds.”
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But Claudia Puig of USA Today is less enthusiastic.
“Insidious: Chapter 2 appears to be the sum of the unusable parts from James Wan’s recent haunted house feature The Conjuring,” she wrote. “It seems cobbled together from outtakes. And on the matter of the title, there’s nothing remotely subtle or sly about this lazy movie.”
Puig said the sequel “just seems to be going through the motions, hoping for undiscriminating and insatiable fans of the genre to lap it up.”
The Guardian reviewer Mike McCahill said the movie’s narrative reframing is ambitious but “it tends to treat its gotcha moments as throwaway wind-ups designed to spill and thus sell more popcorn.”
Roger Moore of the McClatchy-Tribune News Service, said Insidious Chapter 2 is “sillier” than Insidious and not “as clever as the screenwriters seem to think.”
He wrote: “The movie isn’t remotely as scary as the film it follows. But it’s still entertaining, on some level, even though you can tell that the ‘name’ actors are waiting for the checks to clear and eager to hand off the ‘franchise’ to lesser lights.”
Peter Hartlaub of San Francisco Gate called the sequel “entirely unnecessary.”
“Insidious 2 is just more of Insidious, minus the element of surprise,” he wrote.
At IGN, Max Nicholson described it differently.
“Simply put, Insidious 2 isn’t so much a sequel to Insidious as it is the last 30 minutes of Insidious,” he wrote.
Nicholson recommended moviegoers see the first more before going to the sequel.
“Suffice to say, Insidious 2 draws heavily from its predecessor — it is after all called Insidious Chapter 2. That said, it pays off for fans of the franchise curious to see how the Lambert storyline comes to an end.”
Decidedly no fan of the movie is Jeannette Catsoulis of the New York Times, who called it “a mess from start to finish.”
Catsoulis opined: “Insidious: Chapter 2 is the kind of lazy, halfhearted product that gives scary movies a bad name. From its robotic acting to its generic props (enough already with the self-motivated children’s toys), this shoddy sequel, tacked together with the cynicism of a carnival barker, suggests that the director, James Wan, is long overdue for a vacation.”
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