The Life of Chuck

The latest from the director of Oculus, Gerald's Game, and Doctor Sleep is advertised in the trailer as coming "From the heart and soul of Mike Flanagan." When a filmmaker under 50 years of age, who's known primarily for inventive horror movies, has his latest Stephen King adaptation advertised with a line that would make Ron Howard wince, you know something has gone seriously wrong in a career. The Life of Chuck is one of those mawkish short stories that King probably dashed off between writing 1000-page horror novels because he had an amusing idea that made for a diverting enough read. However, when transferred to film and shot with such elevated pretension, it becomes insufferable slop. King's sentimental side only works when he taps into childhood memories and emotions that we all share to one degree or another. I defy anyone to find anything relatable in this high-concept in search of a point.

The story's narrative gimmick is that it unfolds in three chapters told in reverse chronological order. (Actually, I'm not sure this is a gimmick since there literally would be nothing to this story were it told straightforwardly.) The film begins as the tale of the world slowly coming to an end for unknown reasons, told mainly through the eyes of an elementary school teacher (Chiwetel Ejiofor). As he witnesses his neighborhood and the rest of civilization falling apart around him, he observes multiple billboards and advertisements thanking a mysterious accountant named Charles "Chuck" Krantz, with the words "Charles Krantz: 39 Great Years! Thanks, Chuck!" In the second chapter of the film, a vignette set nine months earlier, we meet Chuck (played by the never-impressive Tom Hiddleston) as he encounters a street-busking drummer (Taylor Gordon) while taking a break from a banking conference. He dances to her beats, attracting a crowd and eventually a dancing partner (Annalise Basso). In the last/first section, we learn about Chuck, watching him as a child (played at seventeen by Jacob Tremblay) who loses his parents in a car accident and, at age seven, goes to live with his paternal grandparents, Albie (Mark Hamill) and Sarah (Mia Sara). The warm Sarah instills a love of dancing in Chuck, while the gruff, alcoholic Albie teaches him to love math, convinces him to give up on his dreams, and plants in him a fear of what's inside the very Steven Kingesque cupola of their house.

Everything is held together with unbearable narration from Nick Offerman. Choosing the unmistakably glib comic actor to give voice to this preposterous nonsense drops the movie from the two stars I might have given it, thanks to its unusual cast, and places it squarely in the category of one of the year's worst movies. The majority of this film is the third chapter, which tells a coming-of-age story about a little boy who suffered some hard knocks learning to love dance but ultimately chooses to turn his back on that to become an accountant. Ya know, the stuff most feel-good Hollywood movies are made of. The second part is designed to illustrate how even the most banal everyman may possess some poetry, art, or magic within him, which can bring a little bit of joy into his life and that of his fellow humans. And the first part has nothing to do with any of that; it's just an interesting way to begin to tell an uninteresting story.

Sure, it's nice to see Mia Sara (the princess in Ridley Scott's Legend, the girlfriend in John Hughes's Ferris Bueller's Day Off, and the wife of the titular time-traveling police officer in Peter Hyams's Timecop) come out of retirement to play this significant supporting role. It's also fun to see Heather Langenkamp (star of A Nightmare on Elm Street) again, and to get a rare live-action performance from Mark Hamill, who has become far more well-known as a voice actor post-Star Wars (though I would have expected a more consistent dialect than what we get here from someone so famous for voicework). But these characters, and many of the actors, are barely one-dimensional.

Ejiofor sets a pattern as the first of this film's many earnest teachers who instill positivity in their students—even in the face of the world coming to an end, there's still time to remind everyone that we're all special. He spends much of this chapter connecting with various individuals before reconnecting with his ex-wife (Karen Gillan). If this first chapter were a short film about a man having several brief encounters on the last day of life on Earth, ending with him sitting and pondering the end of the universe with the person with whom he formed the strongest connection, I might have loved it. In such a short film, the cause of the end of the world wouldn't really matter. Here, why the world is ending is essentially the only thing that matters.

A nice short film could also be made out of chapter two. In fact, I bet there are dozens of shorts out there bearing an astonishing similarity to this chapter. However, I'll wager that a short film about two strangers who come together on the street and magically dance with perfect, rehearsed choreography would cast the street musician drummer accompanying them with someone a hell of a lot more impressive than the one here. We're told she's dropped out of Juilliard so she could express herself more authentically, but what we get here's about as impressive as a teenager who just watched a Stomp performance and got inspired.

As for the film's main story, what is this nonsense? The Life of Chuck builds its premise around Walt Whitman's phrase "I contain multitudes" from his poem "Song of Myself." The movie appears to be designed to make the viewer feel like every life is important, but it only succeeds in making every human seem insignificant. King's interpretation of Whitman's iconic statement is... let's say, unique. Flanigan's screenplay is listless and saccharine, with dialogue that feels like it was plagiarized from a self-help book. And Offerman's syrupy narration is almost entirely unnecessary and redundant—it feels like it's only there to reassure us that there's a storyteller here and that all of this will eventually add up to something if we hang in there. Spoiler alert—that doesn't happen.