I don’t understand how you could spend so much time with these characters and fail them so horribly. It was all in their hands, with a masterclass original, a solid set-up for going forward, and the possibility for an enriching evolution of it all. We arrived at something resembling Halloween: Curse of Michael Meyers - switching it up with no tangibly viable path away or forward, just further into the putrescent asshole of franchise fatigue futility I will give it this: this is a finale with finality, but the only ultimate evil defeated in this film was the concept there was more that could be said well about this killer, his victim, those around them and the town.
The leaps in character logic and plot progression was baffling. Why almost all of these characters acted in the way that they did was stupefying. From the “I spent decades prepping to kill/revenge but am now writing Suzie homemaker/writer with my flipping-off-tits attitude” to the new man on the scene who is mentally crumbling/possessed/enjoys the darkness and wildly swings; the psychology and expression here makes no sense. Unless it is some dark psychic force that infects them and the script writers, there isn’t much of another way to make all of their nonsense fit. Also,(minor spoilers ahead) but Mike has been hanging in the sewers for years, eating rats and hobos (?), waiting for a best bud to come along and let him teach his art to snap him out of his funk? Honestly, that all makes as much sense as the band dork HS bullies picking on a college age killer before he acts like a dangerous asshole and gets our youngest female protagonist to commit to running away with him after a week of knowing eachother.
I would be ok with things being tenuous if they were able to inject any kind of intrigue and even the slightest bit of horror. I think that the opening scene was engaging, a jolt to the system & franchise, and could have set up some solid dominoes to fall. Unfortunately, the rest of the film was a mess. It totally lacked horror and sense.
