It (2017)

2017
Directed by Andy Muschietti
Starring Jaeden Lieberher, Bill Skarsgard, Wyatt Oleff, Jeremy Ray Taylor, Sophia Lillis, Finn Wolfhard, Jack Dylan Grazer and Chosen Jacobs

Now that the Halloween projects are over, I can finally get to this little movie called It.  You may have heard of it.  It's grossed something like the GDP of a small country much to the surprise of a lot of industry professionals, but I've got to say that I wasn't surprised in the least bit by the success of this film.  Why?  I was one of the kids, baby.  If you were seven years old in 1990 like I was when the original miniseries adaptation of Stephen King's undisputed masterpiece, if you remember just HOW big of a deal those two nights on television were.  Two nights of kids, clowns, and crazy Tim Curry acting as nutty as Christopher Lloyd going full Doc Brown.  I also don't know if it was the first major thing in pop culture to portray a scary clown, but it's largely thanks to that film that we now have a whole army of weirdos dressed up as clowns wandering around the streets of America trying to creep people out. 

The miniseries was also my introduction to Stephen King.  It would be a few years before I took the plunge and read one of his books (the first was The Shining).  That miniseries never escaped me, and I looked at the book multiple times at the library, but it took a while to pull the trigger.  Why?  It's over a THOUSAND FREAKIN' PAGES LONG.  And that was my 1998 Fall and Winter reading project.  The book is substantially meaner than the miniseries and even the movie in question today, because it really, really delves into the whole bullying aspect of the story.  It's also far from Stephen King's scariest book.  But it's SO emotional.  We get the story of a group of bullied kids coming together to face off against their bullies, and then face off with the ULTIMATE bully - a nameles, faceless, ancient entity that does its best to scare all of the kids to death.  That is powerful, timeless stuff.  As a result, a whole lot of people from those in my age bracket all the way up to those young whipper-snappers today were excited for this movie.  $650 million later, here we are.  Get ready.

The novel, the 1990 miniseries, and this flick all have the same opening sequence, and it's a doozy.  We meet the main character Bill Denbrough (Jaeden Lieberher), a sensitive kid with a stuttering problem, as he builds a paper boat for his little brother Georgie.  Said little brother then takes the boat outside in the rain...and meets the creepy clown.  I was pleased as punch when I found out that this movie had the R rating, and it doesn't puss out here as we get Georgie biting it in very graphic detail.  We then warp forward to the beginning of the following summer, and since this movie takes place in 1989, it means that we also get some good nostalgic clothing choices and lines of dialogue.  Of course, Bill is still grieving for Georgie, and it's from this point that we meet the crop of characters.

Bill's group of friends include wisecracking Richie Tozier (Finn Wolfhard), straight-laced Rabbi's son Stan Uris (Wyatt Olef) and hypochondriac Eddie Kaspbrak (Jack Dylan Grazer).  At 135 minutes, we get plenty of time to know each of them - always a plus!  The four of them are at odds with bully Henry Bowers, and man, what a dick this guy is.  Rounding out the main group is um...overweight guy Ben Hanscom (Jeremy Ray Taylor) and Beverly Marsh (Sophia Lillis), the latter of whom an outcast due to rumors going around that she's the school bicycle.  The movie has an excellent group of child actors and everyone puts forth a worthwhile effort, but I think Lillis shines the brightest out of everybody.  She has a home life that I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy, and as the lone female in Losers' Club (the name that they eventually come up with for themselves) she's the strong central point that holds the movie together.  For added drama, there's also the little love triangle plot between Beverly, Bill and Ben that gets repeated from both earlier iterations of this story, as well as the late addition of slaughterman's son Mike Hanlon (Chosen Jacobs) to round out the group.

Whoa, this is a horror movie, right?  Most definitely.  Ladies and gentlemen, the premise of It: the town of Derry, Maine where this all takes place is home to an evil entity that no one can quantify.  It is always there, but every 27 years it re-emerges to feed - mostly on children.  In particular, the children who already have fear in their lives like the tormented youths of the Losers' Club.  It takes the form of whatever you're afraid of, scares the crap out of you, and eats, but since a lot of kids are frightened of clowns we get Pennywise the Dancing Clown as its Default Mode.  Bill Skarsgard takes the role here, and I'm not gonna lie, I thought he did his best but Tim Curry was much more memorable.  Not to mention funny.  Here, Pennywise himself is just kind of a Heath Ledger Joker-lite.  Also, for some reason the director decided to shaki-cam Pennywise up during some of the scenes where he attacks the kids.  Early on, he gets one of Henry Bowers' bully friends to establish that he's a menace, along with the movie's one disturbing bit involving the eerie woman in the painting that Stan is afraid of.  As was aforementioned, once I aged a little I didn't find It to be a particularly scary story but this movie didn't frighten me in the least bit.

A horror movie that doesn't scare the audience might sound like a pretty big complaint, and in most cases it is, but fortunately this movie has a lot more going for it.  Just like the book, we get to go on a ride with these characters we care about as they piece together what the ghost-like being stalking them at their most vulnerable moments is (or isn't, to be more accurate), find out where it lives, and then band together to beat it.  Pretty much every plot cog meets in the big epic finale located under the creepy old house on Neiboldt Street where It seems to reside.  All seven kids?  There.  Pennywise?  There.  Henry Bowers?  There.  Eddie telling off his mother and Beverly killing the d**k out of her abusive dad?  There.  Along with a trademark Richie Tozier one-liner or two.

The movie's biggest strength is its VERY welcome sense of humor.  I've gotta tell you, while I was excited that we were getting another film version of It, I was more than a little nervous about how it would portray its kids.  Call it the "emo-ization" of kids/teen-agers in media, but if I would have had to watch a group of mopey sourpusses for 135 minutes...I might have had to write a strongly-worded letter.  Fortunately, that's not the case.  You might not be scared by this movie, but the dialogue between the kids is legitimately funny stuff that gives the movie a surprising weight.  I know that a lot of people disagree, but this is why the Bond series is now dead to me - they've given the whole series a fatal humor-ectomy, and as a result he's not cool anymore, he's just an empty suit.  Not so here.  You'll remember these people by name when the movie is finished, although admittedly I didn't need any help in that regard.  I read all 1100 pages of this thing back in the day, dammit! 

That emotional investment made up for what I thought was the relative weakness of Pennywise here, and a big reason for that is that this flick exclusively chose to stick with the story involving the characters as children.   As a nerdy middle-school kid reading that book, I related to this story very strongly as a metaphor for facing life and fear head-on.  Spoiler alert for those who are extremely, extremely not in the know: the original novel and the miniseries tells its story over two timelines, one with the Losers' Club as kids and later on as they go back to Derry 27 years later to take It down once and for all.  Another spoiler alert: It ain't dead.  Which means that we're getting a sequel soon with Bill, Beverly, Ben etc. as adults.  I wish I could fake excitement, but I'm not, because I never found these characters anywhere near as interesting as boring grown-ups.  But maybe the upcoming film will surprise me.  For starters, I think they should stick with relatively unknown actors for the main roles, because the last thing I want to see is f**king Anne Hathaway as grown-up Beverly.  As the Internet Wrestling Community likes to say, let's just wait and see.

As for this movie, 2017 It gets a *** 1/2 out of ****.  You won't have any struggle getting to sleep after this one, but it's a damn entertaining flick with almost as much power as the legendary book it's based on.  Minus the child gang-bang scene.  Google it.