IT is what IT is: Not as good as people say

Rating: 2/10 (10 October 2017)

IT (2017) has received surprising amount of favorable reviews from critics and audiences alike so, while I didn't expect it to be a masterpiece, I thought I would at least be in for a pretty decent movie and a solid scare when I ordered my ticket. I was sorely mistaken.
Honestly, I think nostalgia is 90% of the reasons It received so much praise: Objectively speaking, it's just a bland, uninteresting and, especially during the kids' dialogue scenes, immensely cringeworthy experience. At one point, the girl in the group strikes up a particularly stomach-turningly cringeworthy conversation with the fat kid and their conversation goes something like this:
Girl: "Aren't we in the same social studies class?" Fat kid: "Yeah, my name is Ben, but most people around here just call me..." Girl: "...the new kid, yeah, I know."
Most of the lines spoken between the young protagonists are just as unrealistic, unoriginal and on-the-nose.
Which brings us to the next of the film's major shortcomings: Every character is like a template cutout, everything about the so-called losers' friendship as forced and contrived as the dialogue between them. For some unapparent reason, the scriptwriters, who seem unable to even pretend to know the meanings of words like 'subtlety' and 'nuance' felt it necessary to assign each of the misfits who comprise the 'losers' squad' with a particular trait that sets them apart from other kids and makes them targets of the (likewise horribly caricatured) school bullies: One stutters, one is fat, one is Jewish, the son of a Rabbi, one is rumored to be slutty, one is black and homeschooled and I honestly don't know if I just forgot about one or two of them, that's how forgettable the whole thing was
Cardboard characters and wooden script aside, isn't the movie praiseworthy for its acting and cinematography, you might ask. Well, the actors did do a decent job, but only compared to your average child actor, and I guess the cinematography was above average (I remember two very effective birds-eye shots at intense moments). But It is by no means a style-over-substance tour-de-force substituting interesting dialogue with visual prowess, like, say, Suspiria (1977), another 20th century horror classic soon to be revisited, and thus, there is ultimately nothing to make up for its horrendous script and story. Regarding Bill Skarsgaard's much-touted performance as the eponymous clown, well, it really isn't something special and by no means a good reason to go see the movie anyway.
But wouldn't all this be irrelevant if It at least delivers what you'd expect from a horror movie; a good scare? Maybe, but It falls short in the scariness department, too, essentially playing like a non-stop jumpscare prank: I'm not one to look down on a good jumpscare but at a rate of approximately one every three or four minutes, my guess is that most adult viewers after half an hour or so, would be desensitized to and ultimately annoyed by them.
It's a complete waste of time.