Review: IT (2017)

IT 
(HORROR/FANTASY) 
★★
Directed by Andy Muschietti
Screenplay by Chase Palmer & Cary Fukunaga, and Gary Dauberman
Based on the novel by Stephen King
Starring: Jaeden Lieberher, Jeremy Ray Taylor, Sophia Lillis, Finn Wolfhard, Chosen Jacobs, Jack Dylan Grae, Wyatt Oleff, Bill Skarsgard, Nicholas Hamilton, Jake Sim, Logan Thompson, Owen Teague, Jackson Robert Scott, Stephen Bogaert, Stuart Hughes
Rated R for violence/horror, bloody images, and for language.
135 minutes
Verdict: IT has a very good look and will no doubt be very popular, but it never lives up to the hype, nor is it a particularly good or scary movie in its own right.

Walking through a video rental store and seeing the VHS cassette sleeve of the 1990 two-part TV miniseries It, starring Tim Curry as the sinister, clawed clown poking out through the corner, ranks fairly high in the collective memory of the Millennial generation's childhood chills (as far as unsettling video store clown-sightings go, SHAKES THE CLOWN was close behind IT, personally), and like the Baby Boomers, we Millennials have an all too apparent hard-on for our childhood memories.  I suppose that makes sense.  It's a lot nicer to say our big childhood fear was Tim Curry in clown makeup and not getting blown into oblivion by terrorists once 9/11 happened (the Baby Boomers thought the 1950s were a paradise because it was before the Vietnam War, Watergate, the JFK assassination and all the civil unrest; Millennials think the 1990s were a paradise because they were before 9/11), and the hype is now crazy hot for the new and shiny IT, partly because we're nostalgic to an obnoxious fault and partly because it's easier to cope with the evil clown in the movie than it is to deal with the evil clown in the Oval Office (lol, jk, he's not "evil", but you know, dang, topical...).  As far as horror goes, clowns are kitschy and feel more ironic than genuinely scary, furthermore, the one played by Bill Skarsgard in this film looks too much like a Victorian Juggalo, but the hype is high, people are saying great things, and I was hoping for a pleasant surprise.  Unfortunately, the new iteration of IT is a lot like a gory version of THE GOONIES, which I realize might sound like a sound recommendation to some folks, but no. 

I've never read the book (although I did watch the miniseries while binging horror movies in college, and it was boring, except for Tim Curry, who was a lot of fun in his frustratingly few scenes as the clown), but I suspect this is a pretty faithful adaptation except for the time in which it's set (the part of the book which this covers is set in the 1950s, while the movie is set in the 1980s, allowing them to milk all those '80s pop culture references that are so hot now thanks to Stranger Things).  Beginning in 1988, in the small town of Derry, Maine, a little boy chases a runaway paper boat down the street before it falls into a storm drain, right into the hands of a clown strangely standing there named "Pennywise" (Bill Skarsgard), and the boy never returns home.  A year later, the missing boy's older preteen brother Bill (Jaeden Lieberher) is convinced that his little brother, whose body was never found, must have washed down the town's sewer pipes, so he persuades his group of eccentric friends, dubbed "The Losers' Club", to help him investigate.  Along the way, the Losers incorporate a few new members who've had similar encounters with "It" or Pennywise the Clown, as It sometimes manifests along with other apparitions of It's victim's greatest fears, including Ben (Jeremy Ray Taylor), whose interest in local history reveals a pattern of It's attacks going back decades, and Beverly (Sophia Lillis), a bullied and slandered girl who quickly catches the eyes of the formerly all-boy Losers.
There's quite a few cliched and/or contrived kids to juggle in the Losers' Club; Bill, Ben and Beverly (whoa, Bs) emerge as the closest to a main trio, but then there's also Richie (Finn Wolfhard), the obnoxious loudmouth with oversized glasses, Stanley (Wyatt Oleff), the Jewish kid practicing the Torah for his upcoming bar mitzvah, Eddie (Jack Dylan Grazer), the short hypochondriac, and Mike (Chosen Jacobs), who's reluctantly learning the family business in the slaughterhouse.  It's at least two kids too many, and all of them have their own storylines about the adults in their lives who oppress, abuse and terrorize them.  Plus, there's a whole b-plot with the out-and-out sociopath bully with a mullet, Henry Bowers (Nicholas Hamilton), the kind of recurring Stephen King bully character who entirely lacks any realistic sense of consequences.  It's a lot of characters and plot, bloating the movie to two hours and fifteen minutes, and it's only the first half of the source material.  There seems to be some illusion that the Losers' Club is an impossibly endearing crowd, but they're all very contrived and not a one of them feels like an authentic kid.  There's an idea that if a you show kids swearing and acting rough that automatically feels real, but the kids of IT always stink of self-important attempts to be funny or honest, while rarely being either.  Bill has a stutter and wispy hair, Beverly is simultaneous bullied and abused but also outgoing with manic pixie dream girl levels of confidence, stripping down to show up the Losers cliff-diving before they've even met, and for all its supposedly raw depiction of adolescence, the briefs the boys are wearing in the swimming scene look like they were just barely bought at Wal-Mart five minutes before shooting.  I don't know, that just really stood out to me.

As to the clown, Skarsgard (probably best known previously from Hemlock Grove, and appearances in ALLEGIANT and ATOMIC BLOND) is fine, playing with no shortage of enthusiasm, even when the look of Pennywise is overdone and the teeth are absurd.  Neither he nor the movie as a whole is uniquely scary though, even compared to what's been shown in the previews, and use of cheap tricks like the use of a sudden loud beat to create a jump scare when his eyes come into view, even before there's any clear indication of his true menace is disappointing.  Admittedly, if you come across a clown sitting behind a sewer grate, maybe don't trust that clown, but the little kid talking to him doesn't know any better, and it's obnoxious that the movie feels the need to go right for the jump instead of a more confidently quiet chill.  Going full in with the R rating, it's also sometimes unnecessarily gory in a way that comes off as unintentionally funny (particularly an early scene involving the loss of a limb), when subtlety would have gone a lot further.  There are a few nice moments and spooky imagery though, and the investigations of horrors in the town's history add some points of interest.  Overall, the movie has a very strong, crisp and polished look, being shot by South Korean cinematographer Chung-hoon Chung, whose other work includes multiple Chan-wook Park films, including the iconic look of the original OLDBOY.  The look and sound of the movie is all very fine, standing out among the often faster and looser approach of cheaper contemporary horror films, but child personalities and screenwriting fall way short.  It was never likely to live up to the hype, but it burn brightly enough in the moment for most of those who are looking forward to it, even if it falls out of memory as soon as the next hot thing comes along.

                                                                                                                                                         Images via Warner Brothers