Tim Curry’s Pennywise was a seasoned vet in calmly controlling horrifying situations with dialogue, while Skarsgard’s iteration often came across as a Scooby-voiced threat borrowed from another horror franchise.
Following the fairly excellent opening, in which the sewer-bound and glow-eyed Pennywise lures Georgie in, IT doesn’t really let the terrifying villain toy with its victims to build up their fears.
Perhaps the larger special effects budget played into this, and that budget was certainly responsible for some of the wildest moments, but money can’t buy me dread, I guess.
More often than not, danger-filled scenes make it look like the toothy clown is just trying to kill someone (or make them float, to be sure) before he’s stopped short for consistently arbitrary reasons.