The kids learn that their town is in the grip of an evil force-the It of the title-who emerges every 27 years to feast on the locals, particularly the children. The problem is that the plot escalates in its ridiculousness, and Muschietti can’t control it. Muschietti, who directed the effective 2013 horror thriller Mama, starring Jessica Chastain, does a fine job of sketching each of these kids as individuals, a challenge that even more experienced directors sometimes fail to meet. She’s just a smart, considerate girl who tends to keep to herself. At school, she’s been branded “fast,” though there’s no truth to that accusation. Beverly (Sophia Lillis), the only girl in the group, is slightly older, and she’s living a secret nightmare life at home. He is also black, and so, like Stan, he’s another small-town Maine rarity.
Ben is saved by Bill and the others, and two more kids end up joining the group: Mike (Chosen Jacobs) lives on a nearby sheep farm, where his chores include some of the more challenging work farmers need to do.
At one point he attempts to carve his name into the stomach of another local kid, Ben Hanscom (Jeremy Ray Taylor). The boys’ chief nemesis is teenage bad apple Henry Bowers (Nicholas Hamilton), and he’s not your average harmless misguided delinquent. His six-year-old brother, Georgie (Jackson Robert Scott), disappeared earlier in the year-the event is dramatized with chilling precision in the movie’s opening sequence. Bill Denbrough (Jaeden Lieberher) is one of the quieter, more thoughtful members of the gang he has a stutter he can’t control, and he’s still reeling from a recent family tragedy. There’s asthmatic mother’s boy Eddie Kaspbrak (Jack Dylan Grazer), gangly Jewish kid Stanley Uris (Wyatt Olef), whose religion puts him in the minority in small-town Maine, and wiseguy comedian Richie Tozier (Finn Wolfhard). It’s the end of the 1988 school year in the small Maine town of Derry, and a bunch of the nerdier, less-popular kids are looking forward to a summer of being picked on by the town bullies. Rob Reiner’s 1986 Stand By Me is the obvious comparison point. At its best, it’s a sometimes-entertaining evocation of the way kids think and talk within their little cliques, and of the way they protect one another with fierce loyalty. Director Andy Muschietti’s It, adapted from King’s disquieting 1986 epic of the same name, doesn’t cut very deep and isn’t very scary.
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