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There are better King books, but this is one I always reread. So of course I wanted to see how this one turned out, and while it's not awful viewed on its own merits, they completely missed what made the book so compelling. And that is the boy David's(Shane Haboucha) relationship with God.
It starts out well enough in the first hour. Peter and Mary Jackson are stopped by a cop on their way back to New York, the cop notices a bag of pot belonging to Peter's sister, yadda yadda, all hell breaks loose. Ron Perlman plays the possessed schizo cop exactly, with some parts menace and a whole helluva lot of giddiness. He's rounding up people for unknown reasons in a jail cell, and you later find out that he's been taken over by a buried entity called Tak, which Chinese miners let out about a century ago, and was just discovered again the days before. Alright...weird, I know, but now that plot's outta the way...
The other groups he rounds up is the Carver family, who all give pretty solid performances. Matt Frewer (My life for you!!) plays the God-crazy boy David's father, gives what is probably the only normal acting job. It's not rife with bad attempts as wit, just a dude who's losing his family and is going through hell.
Shane Haboucha SEEMS like he's giving a go at the same thing (and he CAN act, quite good, I've seen him on Law & Order, CSI, and Monk), but both the script and the director (Mick Garris, in his sixth Stephen King adaptation) seemed to pass him off as a breathy, holier than thou zealot that's totally unlike the book's version of David. There, he's simply mature for his age, and intelligent, but in the movie it's hard to even see him as a kid at all. It's like he's doing a bad impression of a middle aged evangelist, and he doesn't seem at all crushed as his family (starting with his little sister) is thrown to the side on God's will like flimsy paper cups.
Someone who should've taken more center stage is Johnny Marinville, played by Tom Skerrit. In the book (I know, I know, all this "in the book" bullcrap, but I can't find why they changed it) he's a straight up smartass, and you love him for it.
Because really, he's the only one who's along with the reader, thinking all of this is totally out there. But here, you only see him as a coward in a flashback, never the leader as he comes off as in the book. He was a good character because of it, a layered character, but that was excluded as well.
In terms of the effects and the gore, it's all surprisingly very much intact. Perlman's degradation is shown wonderfully, and the violence (corpses swinging from fans, pencils in the eyes, the kid's ear's bleeding after squeezing his head through the cell bars) isn't shied away from. Does it make up for what's lost from the book? No, but you see they were trying at least.
The good moments were kept- David's escape and killing of the coyote, the cop's crazy behavior, and the last China Pit scene were exact.
Anabeth Gesh and Steve Weber turn in crap performance, Gesh being the worst of the two. There wasn't a moment where her lines weren't making my eyes roll. Weber tries attempts at being a smart aleck and fails at it.
But the worst part about it is how they handled David's total story. For one thing, the scene where he asks "What no one dares to ask for", to bring his friend out of a coma, was way too brief and simple. It doesn't show that he converted, and it wasn't exactly clear that David owed God something because of it. And they didn't show destroying Tak WASN'T all that important; God was simply offended by it, and wanted it gotten rid of.
In that way, God was a character in the book. A little selfish, and plenty demanding. "Sane people don't believe in God", a line I liked from the book, is totally changed around in the movie when David says "Believing in God is sane". Er...alright.
They use the book's "God is cruel" message here, but you never believe it. In the movie, you have the feeling that God really is doing things for the better, when he really isn't. He took advantage of David's prayers, in a way.
And the last thing. A lot of people complained that David never seemed that disturbed by the deaths of his family throughout. Well, that's because he's under the idea that God would take him last, and that he'd be with them in the end. No dice. Like Johnny said, "Sometimes he makes us live", and the thought of David later having to cope with that so young was the most affecting part of the whole book. He's totally alone now. But here, he just sort of shrugs, thinks "Oh well, God did it, so it's not THAT bad...".
Phew...I'm not religious at all, but the way it was handled in the book was fascinating, and the fact that they totally missed they mark was the movies downfall. See it for the first hour, then watch as it all crumbles without the proper care it needed.
score 5/10
belovedjackass 29 May 2006
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw1382964/ |
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2-4-2021 03:20:09