With how badly his last attempt at darker storytelling turned out with the woefully mishandled cop thriller The Little Things, the prospect of writer/director John Lee Hancock taking on a Stephen King adaptation is a worrying one. Films based on King’s books can be very hit or miss, and this year has already featured a particularly big miss with the Firestarter remake. But hey, it’s starring Jaeden Martell, who was a key part of one of my favourite King films with It: Chapter One; maybe this will actually work out. Well… it kinda does?
In the larger King catalogue, this is closer to The Body (the basis for Rob Reiner’s Stand By Me) than it is to his more straight-forward horror material. There’s a supernatural element to it in the form of the titular phone, but the story is primarily about the coming-of-age of Martell’s Craig. Craig first meets Mr. Harrigan (Donald Sutherland) at an early age, when Harrigan hires him to read books to him due to his failing eyesight. While there are easy jokes to be made about an elderly man taking a little boy to his house so that the boy can read Lady Chatterley’s Lover to him… way too many jokes, in fact… the relationship between them is quite compelling, as are their respective performances.
Craig’s voice-over narration can be a bit overwrought and overwritten at times, but Martell manages to give it a decent equilibrium, and his familiarity with King’s prose allows him to effectively convey the very morbid and confronting shit his character goes through in-story. Mr. Harrigan is written as an old-school capitalist with something of a stochastic body count, with an age-appropriate approach to technology (which we will get to in due course), both of which easily could have fallen into caricature. And yet Sutherland manages to give it just enough humanity to make his friendship with Craig make sense. It reads like how this kind of on-screen dynamic would be played in an older Disney movie, which keeps things innocent enough for the aforementioned implications to remain just that.
But once things start going dark, and Craig begins to deal with his grief over Mr. Harrigan’s passing, the film does a damn good job of looking at the ideas of death and revenge from the perspective of a teenager. Basically, Craig’s iPhone has a connection to Mr. Harrigan in the afterlife, which he initially uses just for a sense of closure… but once it starts looking like his idle wishes are coming to horrifying reality, Craig starts to lean into it. It’s a ghost story that, admittedly, suffers from Stephen King’s reliance on tropes when it comes to how Craig’s high school is populated (stuck-up “popular kids”, bullies, etc.), but makes for a good morality play.
However, that’s not really what the film is about. That was the main effect I got from it, but the film has all of one thing that seems to be on its mind: Those darn kids and their smartphones. It starts out okay with an admission that that kind of access to the Internet isn’t automatically a nightmare waiting to happen, and even with how much the script pats itself on the back for being ‘prescient’, Harrigan’s monologue about what the Internet could become is mainly accurate. Hell, I can even get behind the larger idea of how much importance is placed on material possessions.
But the way it’s delivered, with Hancock seemingly far more interested in commenting on such things than really bringing out how unsettling the story concept is… I get that this is ageist, but this really comes across like stereotypical Boomer shit. I don’t know how accurate this is to the original story (although with how verbose the narration is, I find it hard to believe that anything was left out from it), but there’s a real wagging-of-fingers tone to it that feels preachy. Especially since it spends more time decrying the e-viles of smartphones than it does examining the morally ambiguous actions of Craig himself, not to mention Mr. Harrigan’s role in all this.
I’ll admit that I liked this more than The Little Things by a pretty hefty margin, as this actually had me invested in the story and Hancock feels more comfortable with the darker emotions this time around. But that still comes with an asterisk after it, since this kind of anti-smartphone screed falls into the trap of putting all the onus on the device in question, as if human beings are so ensnared by the things that they themselves aren’t to be held accountable for what they do with them. I won’t say that what the film has to say about attachments to material and social status is entirely inaccurate, but I will say that those statements could have been delivered better.
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