This was one of the funniest film of the year, and I am sure that was not what director Andy Muschietti and writer Gary Dauberman were aiming for. But unfortunately, that was the outcome.
It was genuinely funny due to Bill Hader (go watch Barry!) who was the only standout actor; he and James Ransone were a great comedic duo and they deserve a buddy-comedy film after this. But besides the real, good laughs from them, the rest of the film was filled with ridiculousness and over-the-top, exaggerated "scares" that deflated any sense of dread, fear or trepidation that led up to it. The over reliance on (bad) CGIs and blatantly telegraphed jump-scares (can it still be called jump-scares if the audience knows when to jump?) was pathetic for a horror film.
Most tellingly, you know you are in trouble when a horror film's more horrific moments are a gay-bashing in the cold open and domestic violence sequence in the opening minutes of character-introductions. Nothing after that in the bloated, over-wrought, 169 minutes ever came close to those cringing, eyes-shutting moments. And I honestly doubt that Muschietti and Dauberman had the smarts to have the wherewithal to establish a subtext that nothing in the world is scarier and worse than humanity/humans/men.
Not that there were not anything good about this film. For one, it was more faithful to the source material than the 1990 two-part miniseries; secondly, it did - effectively - foreshadowed the final form of It throughout the film such that when It becomes that it was not such a sucker-punch like in the miniseries.
As for the characters, the bonds of the adult members of The Loser Club was better demonstrated and genuine in the TV series than in this film. One of the best things about It Chapter One was the bond between the characters, but here it was lacking. They were obviously split into groups with Hader and Ransone as the comedic pair, Jessica Chastain, James McAvoy and Jay Ryan as the inevitable love-triangle, and Isaiah Mustafa as the always-alone Mike.
Chastain and McAvoy were just there with minimal acting required on their parts (just like in X-Men: Dark Phoenix) and Aussie Ryan's introduction to an international audience was more through his abs than his acting capabilities per se. Also, there was nary any chemistry between all three of them to make any relationship worth rooting for.
Lastly, nobody can replace Tim Curry's Pennywise as the ultimate personification of fear and nightmares. Bill Skarsgard crafted his own unique Pennywise but it was so visually distinctively evil and crazy that its scariness was more dependent on Skarsgard's body language and all the CGI layered over him. You cannot really be scared of something that looked so blatantly evil and mad. Go watch Skarsgard in Castle Rock instead.
Curry, on the other hand, was just an innocuous clown with dead eyes and a crazy grin standing there waving to you...until he struck and - BAM! - coulrophobia for life!
In the end, despite the faults of the miniseries, inevitably at the conclusion it was a much stronger presentation of It than this two-part film franchise. It was scarier, more haunting and more honest.
And Tim Curry is what nightmares are made of.
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