Notice: All forms on this website are temporarily down for maintenance. You will not be able to complete a form to request information or a resource. We apologize for any inconvenience and will reactivate the forms as soon as possible.

Content Caution

HeavyKids
HeavyTeens
HeavyAdults

Credits

In Theaters

Cast

Home Release Date

Director

Distributor

Reviewer

Bob Hoose
  • Previous
  • Next

Movie Review

Most people look at fame and the famous and see nothing but the sparkle of the spotlight, the cheering fans and the beauty of a dream life.

Skye Riley knows that stardom isn’t like that.

Sure, you might get the money, the crowds, the attention and the expensive things if you’re lucky. But the physical and mental pressure of grabbing and holding tight to that illusive brass ring is, quite frankly, hellish. And then when you do latch onto it, it really doesn’t solve your problems. It doesn’t necessarily make you … happy.

Fame came to Skye, and all it really gave her was a nonstop touring schedule, access to other famous people and the drugs necessary to temporarily numb herself against the exhausting rigors of … fame. Next came a life-blearing addiction and then a car accident that killed her lover and left her broken.

Now, a year later, she’s crawling out of physical therapy and rehab with the goal of making a comeback. She’s pushing her scarred body and mind to work through the pain during the dance routines and grueling rehearsals.

But it hurts. It hurts a lot!

So, after her nagging mom/manager drops her off at her hotel, Skye gets a cab over to Lewis’ place. He’s an old high school friend, as in, the guy who everybody knows still pushes drugs of every stripe.

Skye doesn’t want anything like what she used to be into. She’s done with that. She just wants something for the pain. Vicodin will do. She’ll pop in on Lewis and be out in two ticks.

However, when Skye gets there, Lewis is snorting coke and strung out. Then he starts freaking, choking, and begins smiling at her with this super creepy grin. And before Skye can move to calm him down, he picks up a 35 lb. gym weight and smashes his own face. Again. And again.

Lewis mashes his own mug to literal mulch. And about the time his lower jaw snaps and slides off in a glob of bone, cartilage and fleshy gore, Skye falls backward in a state of terrified shock. Then her former friend falls to the floor and bleeds out.

You probably wouldn’t have thought that famous people ever had to deal with such things. But this horror is suddenly a very real part of Skye Riley’s life.

Oh, but that’s not all. Because when Lewis falls over dead, the parasitical entity that was behind his eyes, the demonic thing that drove his crazed smile and gruesome actions, slipped out of him unseen. And it made itself a new home in the gasping person of one Skye Riley.

Skye’s tormented path back into the spotlight has just turned the corner in a new, very dark direction.


Positive Elements

It’s obvious that Skye is trying to repair her floundering life and to make amends with people after recovering from her drug-fueled accident. She publicly apologizes to her staff and gathered fans. She also calls to apologizes to her best friend, Gemma. (The two had a brutal falling out while Skye was in the throes of her addiction.)

Spiritual Elements

At first, Skye doesn’t have a clue about why strange, grinning people start popping up around her or why she’s beginning to have horrible dreams and visions about her bloody and devastating car crash.

Eventually, though, a guy named Morris approaches her and reveals the fact that she is infected with a demonic entity. Morris’ brother dealt with that demon, and it eventually drove him crazy and killed him. Since then, Morris has tracked the undefined entity through the course of eight suicides and murders.

With time, it becomes clear that the demon is causing Skye to see gruesomely horrific murders, people doing terrible things and demon-like stalkers. But she isn’t sure what might be real or what is just in her head.

Sexual & Romantic Content

Skye wears some formfitting and skin-bring outfits while in rehearsal and during a photo shoot. We also see her wrapped only in a towel after a shower and dressed in a loose-fitting hospital gown.

Skye’s assistant has some effeminate mannerisms, which seems to be why Skye’s male sponsor, Darius, visibly avoids the man when they’re in the same room. However, there aren’t any overt statements made about the young man’s sexuality.

A male attacker shows up naked in Skye’s apartment. He walks and runs down a shadowed hallway, shadows obscuring his unclothed anatomy.

Violent Content

The movie’s first scene carries over from the previous film. And in it, several drug dealers are shot and bleed out in gurgling, gore-spitting misery. Then, as a central character runs from other men with guns, he’s hit by a truck and his body is ripped to chunks and smeared across the roadway.

That grisly beginning is emblematic of the intensely messy moments that fill Skye’s unfolding story. We see a car crash and other events that involve impalement, broken limbs and profusely bleeding wounds. Legs break and bones protrude. In one case someone’s wounded leg snaps in half under pressure. Skye’s body sports healed scars on her stomach and back.

Some scenes involve Lewis’s reappearing mulched visage. He grabs at Skye and puts his fingers in her mouth in some cases. In fact, several characters jam their hands or fingers in Skye’s mouth. In one case she bites the offending digits off. In another the attacker yanks her mouth open and jam’s its arm in the young woman’s mouth, nearly up to the elbow.

Groups of attackers grab Skye and batter her to the floor, throw her down on table tops and across the keyboard of a piano. In some cases, she awakes after an attack with no physical marks, other times she’s bruised and cut.

Someone breaks a mirror and then begins hacking away at her own neck and face with a shard. The woman  then rips holes in her throat and gouges out an eye. Then this badly wounded individual falls gurgling to the ground and bleeds out. We see another character forcibly tear his own jaw off with a crowbar. We see a man completely covered in fire.

Someone steps on a broken bottle and slowly pulls large shards of glass out of her bloodied foot.

Skye is battered and thrown around by a bloodied and broken version of herself. Another version of her rips open the scar on its stomach; a huge, skinless creature crawls out from inside, the stretched-out skin flopping down like a soiled shirt. Several people commit suicide with heavy objects, with one person jamming an object into an eye. Of course, most of the above is profusely bloody.

We also witness Skye, as her mental state deteriorates, bearing up under various levels of distress that sometime drive her to scream in mental agony, and other times cause her rip hair out of her own head. (On two occasions she yanks out enough hair to leave bare patches of skin behind.) An elderly woman is bumped off an elevated stage and crashes down on a tabletop.

Crude or Profane Language

There are more than 120 f-words and a dozen s-words scattered about in the dialogue along with multiple uses each of the words “b–ch,” “a–hole,” “a–” and “h—.” There are also nine misuses of Jesus’ name (one of those with an f-word) and 10 misuses of God’s name (including one paired with “d–n”).

Someone uses the c-word. A crude joke is made about oral sex Someone displays an offensive hand gesture.

Drug & Alcohol Content

We see several flashback scenes of Skye and her “boyfriend” snorting coke and engaging in a drug-raged argument that leads to a car crash. We’re also shown news photos of Skye sneaking a quick snort of white powder.

Later, after rehabbing for a year, Skye goes to buy some Vicodin for her pain from a former friend. She watches as he snorts from a large amount of coke on a tabletop. After a sharp bout of pain, Skye swallows an undefined pill.

It’s obvious, however, that Skye is trying hard to clean up her life. Before a large group of people, she states: “Music didn’t put all the drugs up my nose, I did.”

Skye meets someone at a bar where people are drinking bottles of beer and glasses of hard liquor. She also jams a hypodermic needle full of drugs into her own neck.

Other Noteworthy Elements

An intruder strips naked and the camera examines his discarded clothing, including his grossly soiled underwear. In one scene, we watch a crowd’s reaction to someone doing horrendous things to herself offscreen. We hear the crunching and gushing sounds of the damage. Skye vomits after Lewis’ über-gory death.

Skye’s mother is a driven woman who, seemingly, has more concern for Skye’s music career than for her daughter’s welfare. The movie sports a dark, hopeless perspective about the struggle between good and evil, declaring unapologetically that evil will always prevail.

Conclusion

If you, uh, dissect pics like Smile 2 down to their hack-n-slash movie fundamentals, you can sometimes find a little something to praise.

With that in mind, I will note that this horror entry takes a somewhat intriguing story tack as it blends spiritual possession by a gore-greedy parasitical demon with what appears on the surface to be a music artist’s descent into a nervous breakdown.

We then watch the gruesomely hellish experiences Skye Riley endures from a “demon-aware” perspective, while her fans see her decay from a completely different angle. And on that dual-focus front, actress Naomi Scott is emotionally powerful in her portrayal of the mentally plagued protagonist.

That said, however, the rest of this gruesome-minded pic is just jump-scares, gouged out eyes, horrifyingly shattered limbs, ripped open arteries, repulsively mashed cartilage and gristle, and bodily organs splayed out in all their tarmac-shredded, goopy, gloppy glory. Add in an overflowing cup of foul language and drug abuse and whoo! you’ve got a messy cinematic stew.

Smile 2 takes perverse joy in tormenting not only its characters, but any unfortunate viewer watching these people being hacked and mangled in grotesque ways. All in all, it leaves very little here to grin over.


The Plugged In Show logo
Elevate family time with our parent-friendly entertainment reviews! The Plugged In Podcast has in-depth conversations on the latest movies, video games, social media and more.

Bob Hoose

After spending more than two decades touring, directing, writing and producing for Christian theater and radio (most recently for Adventures in Odyssey, which he still contributes to), Bob joined the Plugged In staff to help us focus more heavily on video games. He is also one of our primary movie reviewers.

Want to stay Plugged In?

Our weekly newsletter will keep you in the loop on the biggest things happening in entertainment and technology. Sign up today, and we’ll send you a chapter from the new Plugged In book, Becoming a Screen-Savvy Family, that focuses on how to implement a “screentime reset” in your family!