Butler's Cinema Scene

“IT” My rating: B-

135 minutes | MPAA rating: R

First, let’s all take a slow, non-hyperbolic breath.

Rarely has a mere horror movie gotten the advance raves and widespread cultural attention being lavished on “It,” the new film based on Stephen King’s novel (it was filmed once before, for a 1990 TV miniseries).

Well, it’s a good movie. Not great. It’s way overlong and trips over a few narrative dead ends.

It’s not as interesting or satisfying as either “It Follows” or “Get Out,” two recent groundbreaking examples of the horror genre.

But “It” — written by Chase Palmer, Cary Fukunaga and Gary Doberman and directed by Andy Muschietti (“Mama”) — does hit the sweep spot between jump-in-your-seat thrills and the sort of Spielberg-influenced 1980s adolescent adventure most recently championed by Netflix’s hit series “Stranger Things.”

Basically you’ve got a group of pre-pubescents taking on a supernatural evil that resurrects every three decades or so to snatch unwary children. This creature is a sinister circus clown called Pennywise (Bill Skarsgard) who lives in a small town’s sewers and marks his approach with red balloons.

There’s no explanation of Pennywise’s back story; the screenplay presents him as the pure embodiment of every child’s deepest fears (making him a clown was a brilliant stroke on King’s part) and pretty much leaves it at that.

Dramatically, “It” is a deft balancing act between growing creepiness, an often hilarious examination of youthful behavior, and a compassionate (but superficial) look at adolescent angst.

The leader of these young misfits is Bill (Jaden Lieberher, so terrific in “St. Vincent” and “Midnight Special”), whose little brother vanished a year earlier when he ventured too close to a street grating during a rainstorm. Motivated by sibling love, the stuttering Bill is determined to face his own fears to stop Pennywise’s quiet rampage.

Chosen Jacobs, Jaden Lieberher, Sophia Lillis

The members of Bill’s middle-school crew are pretty much what you’d expect. There’s a Jewish kid (Wyatt Oleff) and a black kid (Chosen Jacobs). There’s a scrawny, wise-talking, profanity-spewing blowhard (Finn Wolfhard, also a member of the “Stranger Things” cast), and the requisite fat kid (Jeremy Ray Taylor) whose obsession with local history provides clues to Pennywise’s long history of nastiness.

A couple of the kids have rather more serious issues.  The girl in the group (Sophia Lillis, a star in the making) may be the victim of sexual abuse at the hands of her creepy dad; meanwhile a sickly boy (Jack Dylan Grazer) must contend with an overprotective mother who exhibits symptoms of Munchausen by proxy.

There’s also a subplot centering on three older bullies (Nicholas Hamilton, Jake Sim, Owen Teague) who dedicate way too much time to tormenting our young protagonists (they seem to have been lifted from “Stand By Me”). Along the way one of these mean-spirited louts actually commits a murder…an act which the film then blithely ignores.

(One gets the feeling that several pieces of “It” were left on the cutting-room floor. The writers inject a plethora of plot points and character issues, few of which get the development they deserve.)

It all boils down to an underground confrontation between the kids and the shape-shifting Pennywise that goes on…and on…and on.

Seriously, “It” needs to lose at least 30 minutes.

That said, the child actors are terrific and Skarsgard’s Pennywise is a smirking nightmare that can’t easily be shaken.

And the film ends with a nice emotional coda as the young friends prepare to go their separate ways at summer’s end.

“It” is never as good as it wants to be, but it’s better than it needs to be.

| Robert W. Butler