Bursting out the backend of a dismal summer movie season and promising to draw massive crowds, “It” will provide headlines that don’t spell doom and gloom for the industry, leaving one to only wish it were connected to a movie more suited for praise.

Adapting the childhood portions of Stephen King’s 1138-page opus, “It” trades in the 1950s action of the novel for the late 1980s, a period so overused that it’s hard to remember when the market wasn’t saturated with it. The story follows The Losers’ Club, a mismatched friend group looking to survive the summer while avoiding insults from their tormentors. One of them has more on his mind, though: Bill (Jaeden Lieberher) is searching for his lost younger brother who, unbeknownst to him, has been sucked into the sewers and mutilated by a monstrous entity just a few months prior. Bill wants nothing more than his brother back, leading his group straight into a confrontation with the terrifying entity known as It, which manifests itself mostly as a murderous clown named Pennywise (Bill Skarsgard).

Ripped of all fear and momentum by Chung-hoon Chung’s uneven and flat cinematography, these sequences become repetitive, tedious and bloated, only delaying the inevitable showdown between the kids and Pennywise. When confrontation does finally arrive, it arrives after nearly two hours of the same cycle on repeat. By then it’s too late for it to be anything but exhausting. It deserves to hit with a heartfelt gut-punch but instead simmers out with a whimper, partly due to the nearly unwatchable, dimly lit final battle. When it’s finally over, you breathe a sigh of relief — not because the horror is over, but because you can finally head for the exits.

One only has to imagine what could’ve been if the film’s original director Cary Fukunaga had stayed on and finished the job. Perhaps the film would’ve been more visually satisfying, more capable of eliciting terror from one of Stephen King’s most frightening characters, instead of the resulting micromanaged miscalculation. Pennywise, the centerpiece of the film’s marketing campaign should be a mysterious evil entity but is anything but. He is such a non-factor in the movie, given so little to do, that it’s hard to even properly judge Skarsgard’s performance.

While “It” ends on a heartfelt note and the promise of an intriguing sequel set 27 years later, the most entertaining part of that follow-up will surely be in the casting. It’s hard to imagine what director Andy Muschietti could concoct to alter the unfortunate path this adaptation has gone down. “It” will surely light up the box office and scare middle-schoolers who sneak into its screenings, but the film feels a lot more like a continuation of this dour movie season than its savior.

“It” opened nationwide on Friday, Sept. 8.