We know what we’re supposed to feel, because Craig’s never-ending voiceover tells us. Harrigan is a stretched out Black Mirror episode in search of anything interesting to say. Harrigan asks him directly why he does it at one point and the answer sounds like a lame excuse the script is making up as it goes along. It’s just scene after scene of Craig reading (my favorite is him reading Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle to this greedy capitalist who’s scandalized by what he hears) without us knowing why this kid is spending so much time with this mean old man. They both sleepwalk through their scenes together, quoting Henry David Thoreau at each other instead of building a meaningful connection. The entire film hinges on the relationship between Craig and Harrigan, but neither the script nor the actors seem interested in creating any chemistry. At his sparsely attended funeral, Craig places Harrigan’s phone in his casket with him, but things get spooky when he starts getting cryptic texts from the phone, after it’s buried six feet underground. In a scene that’s nostalgic for a time before those tiny bricks changed the world but so pro-iPhone, I’m surprised this isn’t an Apple TV+ release, Craig convinces the tech resistant Harrigan to embrace the phone after he tells him he can follow his precious stock market in real time.Īfter warning Craig with a prescient and eye-rolling monologue about the dangers of smartphones (fake news, have you heard of this?), old man Harrigan passes away.
Harrigan gifts Craig a winning scratch off lottery ticket, and as a thank you, Craig buys Harrigan his own iPhone. He realizes all the cool kids at school already have the iPhone, so he gets one too. Side bangs are in style, and the first-generation iPhone is released. When Craig enters high school, it’s 2007. Potter from It’s a Wonderful Life became friends with one of George Bailey’s kids and paid them to read Russian novels to him.
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Harrigan is as hated as he is rich, living in his dark mansion without a TV or radio (it would distract him from making more money I guess), but he sees something in Craig that allows him to let this one person into his life and relax his spiky defenses. He makes Craig read classics such as Crime and Punishment, Heart of Darkness, and every little boy’s favorite, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? Harrigan ( Donald Sutherland), who hires him to do small jobs and read books to him. He befriends the local millionaire banker, Mr. Here he plays Craig, a lonely teenager entering high school who’s mourning the recent death of his mother. The film stars Jaeden Martell, a few years after leading the Losers Club into battle against Pennywise the child eating clown in 2017’s It, one of the best recent King adaptations.
John Lee Hancock, the filmmaker behind the Oscar-winning The Blind Side, directs and writes the adaptation here, but can’t bring any personality or narrative momentum with it. Based on the novella (shorter than a novel, longer than a short story) from King’s 2020 collection If It Bleeds, Mr. Harrigan’s Phone, now streaming for Netflix, sadly goes on the stinker pile. For every Misery, there are eleven Children of the Corn films.
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The same goes for King movie adaptations.
He can be hit or miss (even the best writers may have stinkers when they write an astonishing ten pages a day like King) but if one short story is garbage, chances are the next one will be a fun time. They provide the strong, grounded characters facing terrifying circumstances that he’s famous for in his longer novels, but in a digestible format. These epic tales are his bread and butter, but if you want to get a pure distillation of what makes King a gifted horror writer and storyteller, check out his short story collections. Entire forest ecosystems have been destroyed so we can have The Stand on our bookshelves. Stephen King is best known for his massive novels that require weight training just to hold.
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