On February 21, Brahms: The Boy II, rated PG-13, was released into theaters around the United States. Directed by William Brent Bell, this movie is a sequel to “The Boy” which was originally released in 2016. Actress Katie Holmes and young-actor Christopher Convery play key roles in this movie, as a mother and son. Convery, known as Jude in the movie, befriends a life-sized doll named Brahms after finding him in the ground, and shortly after they become inseparable. Later in the movie, Jude starts acting suspiciously and horrific. 

A recently published review by Roger Ebert, an American film critic, stated, “The truth is that it breaks a cardinal rule of genre filmmaking which is that if your film isn’t going to make much sense, it at least needs to be fun. A movie this boring that doesn’t cohere at all narratively is just dreadful.” Ebert was disappointed in this sequel for not living up to its expectations, and for the plot being bland and uninteresting. Additionally, he stated that, “It is almost as if someone started the project by asking ‘How can we get crazier than the ending of the first movie?’ And then worked back from there,” which implied that the directors were mainly focused on a cliffhanger, and tried to force such a deranged ending, that the rest of the movie was pushed aside and rushed. Ebert overall rated the movie a ¼ stars. 

While Brahms: The Boy II, was released recently and many reviews have had negative things to say. Rotten Tomatoes, the most trusted measurement of quality on movies, said, “More likely to induce boredom than quicken the pulse, Brahms: The Boy II is chiefly scary for the way it undermines the effectiveness of its above-average predecessor.” This means that the only thing remotely scary about this sequel was how it let down the impact of the previous movie. “The Boy” had a grasp on humor that earned a few chills, while “The Boy II” mainly focuses on trauma and unrelated events that had hardly any correlation to the first movie. 

Blake Moore, a student at Battlefield High School who recently watched the movie in theatres, said, “I was really excited to see the sequel to ‘The Boy’ since the first one was very interesting and scary, but when I was watching the new movie I was honestly disappointed in how it was predictable and how it started getting interesting towards the end rather than the rest of the movie.” Moore agrees with the statement by Roger Ebert, explaining that the second movie simply did not impress him. 

Overall, the majority of sources have stated how Brahms: The Boy II disappointed the public for abruptly changing all of the humorous and thrilling aspects of the previous movie. Since the movie did indeed end on a cliffhanger, whether or not a third movie will be published is to be determined.