![]() ![]() While his introduction ends on a disheartening note, everything before is great, a sweet and innocent precious kid talking to this grimly gleeful, peppily growling presence, eyes glowing in the darkness, drool dripping from his bent toothy grin and his guard dropping just enough to show it's all an impressive person suit. Skarsgard is alarmingly good as Pennywise – painting with a different, unnervingly playful and alien shade of menace from Tim Curry’s famed performance. Maybe the shortcomings hurt more because "It" has the parts of an all-timer. By the time the Losers Club is entirely assembled, Muschietti finds more of a flow and story momentum – but, even then, the script struggles to find new scare tactics other than luring a kid alone in a room with a mixed-up Picasso face or clown running to smooch the camera with just enough unneeded CGI to serve as an unwanted accessory to the assault. Still, since that depth isn’t there, the first act feels clunkily paced and repetitive, with each kid getting a five-minute scene of being chased by the deformed ghoul of their displeasure before rewinding and playing the same verse with a new kid. (Not to compare Muschietti’s capable if not hugely compelling approach to a movie that’ll never exist, but one wonders what original director Fukunaga could’ve done for that short-changed aspect considering how essential the murky fog of dread was for "True Detective" season one.) And how could it? The novel is a monster in its own right even the four-hour miniseries couldn’t cram it all in. ![]() The script’s pacing – from Chase Palmer, Gary Dauberman and Cary Fukunaga – doesn’t help, as it struggles to simplify the thematic and emotional depth of King’s book, especially when it comes to the silent menace of the town and, thanks to the time split, how the past still haunts the present. ![]() Seen one bendy-faced monstrosity leer at the lens while the orchestra has a panic attack, seen them all. Save for a few clever twists – the scare involving a projector, for instance, which smartly shocks by playing with editing rhythm and size – the jumpy thrills get repetitive fast. Or having Pennywise aggressively shimmy at the audience en route to then rubbing his face into the camera, with the standard-issue modern horror shrieking on the soundtrack. That’s unfortunately where "It" settles too often for its scares, Muschietti’s bag of tricks frequently limited to rubbing its crooked monsters’ faces into the camera – whether Pennywise, a leper or some other demon from Derry’s past. For the most part, it’s an eerie, uneasy scene … before all that is discarded to turn Pennywise into a loud, rubbery, computer-enhanced tooth monster, showing its hand right away and sending all that eerie mystery and intrigue down the drain, along with poor Georgie. Take its opening setpiece: little Georgie meeting Pennywise the Dancing Clown (Bill Skarsgard) in a rainy sewer grate. But forget that it’s definitely a horror flick – if anything, it trims the greater psychological nuance and subplots for the sake of pushing funhouse jolts – just one that’s not great at scaring. For a movie that throws a ton of scares at the screen – very literally – "It" is startlingly lukewarm at startling the audience, to the point that some defenders argue it’s not actually to be judged as a horror movie but as a psychological thriller. The worst summer vacation ever ensues, along with the death of the real-world clown industry. While pop culture’s current favorite decade, the ’80s, takes the ’50s place, the outline of King’s story faithfully stays about the same: A gang of young outsiders take a break from fearing the kind of blindly murderous rage bullies they just don’t make in movies anymore to do battle with a new terror: a malevolent, otherworldly monster disguised as a clown, floating around the small town's sewers, picking off children to the adults’ collective apathy. As a potent horror movie, the most haunting part of the novel’s first big-screen foray (reminder: the Tim Curry classic was a TV miniseries) ends up being how simultaneously close and far "It" is to greatness. Unfortunately, save for coulrophobics and globophobes – respectively, those afraid of clowns and balloons yes, the latter has its own word – the final product takes far less nerve to watch. So credit where credit is due: Andy Muschietti’s "It" actually made it – and in one piece (well, actually, two pieces the adult years will be its own sequel). Stephen King’s beloved and bountiful book spreads only over a thousand pages, with two interwoven stories told decades apart, seven kid leads, countless tricky tonal shifts and odd details, and one obviously unfilmable kid orgy – and that’s not even including this particular project’s decade of production work, a director dropout and the imposing shadow of an iconic villain performance. It takes a lot of nerve to adapt "It" for the big screen. ![]()
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