Shreesh’s review published on Letterboxd:
Where do I even start? For the past 2 days I have been seeing so many reviews for this and I have never seen a Halloween movie with this much mixed reactions, so I was really excited to see what was the fuss about. This franchise means so much to me, I loved watching the entire franchise during the pandemic. But this movie was a bit disappointing unfortunately.
Let me say the positives first, Jamie Lee Curtis as Laurie was phenomenal here. She was great and this film gave her a fitting end to her legacy character. Michael Myers for the little screen time he had was terrifying. He was brutal and chilling. The last 25-30 minutes were satisfying, it was one of the best third acts of the Halloween franchise. It was bloody and scary. The performances were amazing, no issues there. The score was really good and the every scene with Michael was so much fun. David’s direction was good and to be honest the first 20 minutes were really intriguing and surprising.
Now the issue, this movie suddenly deviates from it’s core plot and takes a weird route that left me baffled. After the first 25 minutes it didn’t even feel like a sequel to Halloween Kills but a random spin off that could have happened in the meantime. They introduce a new character here and believe it or not he had the most screen time and his arc was the most important factor to the movie. It’s not that I hated his character or his devastating arc, it was pretty good but where the movie fails is that they tried to include his character into the finale of Laurie vs Michael, I felt cheated in a way. Michael Myers is on screen for maximum 30 minutes, it was shocking. If this had been a one off like Halloween Season of Witch, with the original cast, I would have appreciated the unique effort. But making a random character the protagonist in the last movie of a beloved franchise was not a wise choice.
I loved the character Alyson in the previous movies and the way they wrote her character for this one was so stupid. She makes these dumb decisions that made the movie even more unbearable. She was one of my favorite character in this new trilogy but they messed up her arc here so much. The actress who played that role was amazing but those odd decisions which her character would never make left me disappointed. I respect David and his team’s writing and the swing they took to the plot but not with the last movie of the franchise, not with Halloween Ends.
Overall it’s a mixed bag that left me confused and pretty sad. It’s one time watchable for Jamie Lee Curtis and that awesome last 20 minutes. Sorry Halloween 🎃 fans!
A 52% for me.
PS - I loved Halloween(2018) and Halloween Kills.
