In the Flesh: IT Chapter Two

This movie prominently features digitally de-aged fifteen-year-olds, which should give you an idea of how much thought its creators put into the process of adapting and filming Stephen King's gargantuan 1986 horror novel. The child actors look like polished plastic cherubs, their faces stiff and uncanny, their voices sped up to an obnoxious pitch to conceal puberty's effects. The Foley work remains indifferent at best, a lot of scary whispering and indistinct children's voices doing sing-song ghostly lullaby crap. Director Andrés Muschietti's camera is restless to no purpose, drifting and shivering during even the most workaday conversations and guy-enters-room shots.

When it comes to framing and delivering scares the movie is an abject failure, relying almost entirely on "the monster charges the shaky camera" and boilerplate bad guy lines like "I can taste your fear!" Nor is the movie content to let its scares speak for themselves, as maybe one in ten passes without a wisecrack from Bill Hader's Richie or James Ransone's Eddie. There is, generously, one upsetting scene in the entire film, which stretches taffy-like to an unbearable two hours and fifty minutes. During a scene in which the adult Losers Club meets at a Chinese restaurant we spend fully a minute and a half watching each character mug and yell before wrapping the whole thing up with a wacky joke as the waitress walks in to find them panicking and bashing their table with a chair.

The acting is a weak spot in a movie already full of holes and limping hard. James McAvoy is overwrought, gnashing out his lines while manhandling children and shouting at his fellow Losers during fully half his conversations with them. Chastain, Mustafa, and Ryan are nonentities without chemistry or fire. The love triangle, with McAvoy as its third point, is both poutily stunted and borderline incomprehensible. The film notably cuts Bill's one-night stand with Beverly, opting instead to lavish attention on a poem written by a young Ben about Beverly's hair. The power of their true love, channeled by said poem, eventually saves them from It's grasp in one of the corniest scenes in recent memory. That it falls in the middle of a final act fully fifty minutes too long only makes it that much more intolerable.

An adaptation neither succeeds nor fails by dint of its faithfulness to the original work, but Muschietti's IT pulls the difficult trick of sucking on its own merits while also perverting and lobotomizing the thematic content of King's novel. Even where it skirts some of the nastier, more prejudiced stuff like Eddie's fat wife Myra it substitutes nothing of substance. King's descriptions of Myra may be fatphobic and lacking in insight and empathy, but the revulsion and psychic terror of the unknown underlying them had power. Instead we get a motormouth grown-up Eddie and Myra becomes a throwaway joke about his having married someone ten times his body weight. It's paint-by-numbers filmmaking, the shape of the thing predetermined and 

Why introduce the conceit that the Losers will die if they don't return home to kill the titular creature if the entire point of the story is the bond they forged with one another in childhood and its inextricable connection to their small-town life? Why throw over King's wonderfully bizarre and grotesque Ritual of Chüd for a fetch quest, a second round of lukewarm scares, and some silly chanting about darkness conquering light? Why introduce a gay subplot if you're going to uncritically do what every mainstream movie has done with its gay stories since the 1980s and cut its throat before it's ever spoken aloud? Muschietti's IT says nothing, and it takes three hours to do it.