King's entertaining pre-pubescent "losers club" undermined by repetitious clown antagonist and clichéd horror plot

Rating: 5/10 (1 October 2017)

Set in the late 80s, Director Andy Muschietti's second adaptation of a Stephen King novel (the first one was a 1990 TV mini-series), takes place in the fictional town of Derry, Maine. What keeps the film from drifting too far ashore as mediocre pabulum (or worse—a series of one clichéd horror film trope after another), is the hard-edged Stephen King worldview and his engaging characters (despite their one-dimensionality).
Right away King treats us to an event straight out of a lurid, small-town newspaper headline: the disappearance (and ultimate murder) of a young boy, who is dragged into a sewer by King's monster (whom we'll get to in a few moments). The sense of dread is palpable throughout the narrative, with the suggestion that the town has been cursed since the last century (pictures of a mill explosion in 1908 that claimed the lives of over 100 children, permeate an old book chronicling the town's history and are brought to our attention by one of the protagonists King adroitly assembles in this coming-of-age tale).
Indeed, King's motley collection of outsiders (pre-pubescents aptly self-named "the loser's club"), each possess a particular handicap that allows them to be subjected to bullying by a small group of bad kids in town, emotional smothering and worse (including sexual abuse) by the adults in the community.
They include the de facto "leader" of the group, Bill, a stutterer who blames himself for the disappearance of his younger brother George (the young boy dragged into the sewer at the film's beginning); Ben, a short, overweight bookworm who is dubbed "tits" by the town bullies who subject him to a savage beating; the over talkative Richie, whose foul-mouth continually gets him into trouble; Eddie, a hypochondriac, who is continually subjected to the aforementioned emotional smothering by an overbearing mother; Stan, the Jewish germ phobic, son of the town's rabbi; Mike, an African-American kid who gets little or no support from his strict granddad; and the group's only female member, Bev, who is subjected to apparent sexual abuse by her leering, creepy Dad.
Beyond these entertaining characters and thei antagonists (including the effective psychopathic kid, Henry Bowers, who ends up murdering his violent, abusive police officer dad, and Alvin Marsh, Bev's depraved father), Stephen King has little elsewhere to go in developing his principal antagonist as well as offering an effective plot.
The principal antagonist of course is Pennywise the clown, the "It" of the film's title, and proves to be hardly believable or scary. That's because once he engages in his "scare routines," they become perfunctory and repetitious. By the time he receives his comeuppance at film's end, we hardly care whether he comes or goes. Not only that, Pennywise's powers have no basis in reality which might be good for teenagers but hardly for more critical adults.
A long-winded explanation of the film's plot is completely unnecessary; suffice it to say, that the "loser's club" does battle with the clown in a haunted house (on two occasions), and finally end up victorious. They accomplish this by realizing that the clown draws its energy from their own fears, and once they're able to rise above those fears, the clown no longer has any hold over them.
The subtext underneath King's nasty fairy tale is that the bullied victims in our society may rise up and defeat the forces of evil if they join together and believe in themselves— not allowing their assorted so-called handicaps to undermine their self-confidence. King's good triumphing over evil reveals a rather simplistic weltanschauung but an appealing one to the masses who purchase tickets in droves, and who demand a resolution with few shades of gray.