Review: The Life of Chuck

Director:  Mike Flanagan

Stars:  Benjamin Pajak, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Karen Gillan

Mike Flanagan’s journey from great hope of pop horror to indulgent bore hit a speed-run thanks to his string of mostly-beloved Netflix miniseries, which increasingly bloated out their running times with melodrama and patience-testing soliloquies. But perhaps the writing was on the wall before this. His adaptation of Doctor Sleep – caught perilously between reverence to Stephen King’s book and Kubrick’s The Shining – felt successfully novelistic, i.e. even in its truncated theatrical cut it seemed like it was never going to end.

I appreciate I’m on the outs with some of these opinions. So be it. The spritely, devilish filmmaker of Oculus and Ouija: Origin of Evil seemed lost to an undisciplined maximalist streak. Keep everything and, if possible, add more.

Half a decade on from Doctor Sleep, Flanagan returns to feature filmmaking with another King adaptation, veering (for the most part) away from his own horror roots and tapping instead into the thick treacle of mawkish sentimentalism that has a habit of gumming up King’s folksy prose. The Life of Chuck dares to ask “What if someone took one famous line of a Walt Whitman poem incredibly literally?”. It fleshes out an egotistical daydream many of us have probably had into a single act of a movie, before interminably working backwards from there across a further 80 minutes, taking a jackhammer to any shred of subtlety in the process.

And if these run-on sentences sound like a tirade already, you’re more switched on than Flanagan credits his audience with being.

Smothered in loud, insufferable narration courtesy of Nick Offerman (that I bet you could jettison entirely and have a far better experience), The Life of Chuck opens – radically – with it’s third act. It feels unconscionably self-satisfied about this. In a non-descript American ‘burb, teacher Marty Anderson (Chiwetel Ejiofor) attempts half-heartedly to reconnect with his ex-wife Felicia Gordon (Karen Gillen) while, all around them, the world is ending. No, really. First the internet goes. Then California. Multitudinous global disasters suggest a fully-fledged apocalypse. It’s quitting-time for the world. This wasn’t what the trailers made this out to be so, for a little while, The Life of Chuck skirts by on a semblance of intrigue, even as Flanagan drops heavy-handed, clumsy clues in the background to the film’s big reveal.

Quite how this all tallies with Tom Hiddleston’s accountant everyman Chuck feels like something I ought not spoil, but Flanagan is so cack-handed with this back-to-front story that it doesn’t even feel worth spoiling. Suffice to say that once the cat’s out of the bag, The Life of Chuck has already peaked. The first (i.e. last) act of the movie suffers from Flanagan’s recent indulgences (people waffle on at great length; everything is at once deeply unfunny and profoundly uncool), but it at least generates some ham-fisted curiosity. A failed attempt at something zeitgeisty like a Fight Club or Donnie Darko (it tilts toward both).

What comes after feels like someone reading you the longest greetings card of your life. The kind that plays a shrill bastardised earworm from a tiny speaker. In a town centre that looks more like the manufactured thoroughfare of an amusement park, Chuck gets deep into the groove of busking drummer Taylor Franck’s (Taylor Gordon) stickwork, and grabs Annalise Basso’s jilted youngster from the crowd for an overlong and impromptu dance number. Offerman’s voice booms, asking us what moved him to do this (as if we didn’t see the flashes of an answer already in Flanagan’s own edit). Act three goes back to Chuck’s childhood for the exhausting origins, as well as a few weepy life lessons about Being All You Can Be and Loving Yourself.

Maybe I’m just too cynical for what Flanagan is cooking here. But beyond personal taste regarding the twee, the cosy and the aggressively motivational, The Life of Chuck fundamentally doesn’t work. Building your narrative backwards like this is a big risk, dramaturgically, that doesn’t pay off at all as presented here. All the important stuff is at the beginning of the picture, and all that’s left after – swaddled in sentiment – are Easter eggs to encourage viewers to circle back and watch it over. It feels like Flanagan is reading us Metaphors for Dummies. His lumpen text is incredibly condescending for something so staggeringly simplistic. Baby’s First Allegory.

There’s really little to any of the characters. Hiddleston’s name sits atop the masthead but he has arguably the least to do beyond some nifty footwork. Ejiofor and Gillen try gamely to carry the first third, but it’s a fairly thankless task with this script. Perhaps the best that can be said is that Benjamin Pajak seems to be having a truly great time as Chuck’s pre-teen self. He has a significant portion of the final third of the film, and he carries it well for all his inexperience. Flanagan flirts with the nostalgia of Spielberg circa The Fabelmans here, but doesn’t particularly pull it off. It all tapers off to the answer to one final mystery, one we haven’t a single care about and which – this being King – offers no surprises whatsoever.

That Flanagan’s work is somewhat technically accomplished doesn’t really matter. In fact, it only underscores that if the bones of what you’re working with aren’t up to snuff, there’s no benefit in how slick your production is. The Life of Chuck reeks of naffness. It’s a tucked-in T-shirt. It’s a Coldplay song. It’s a set of corporate values in an email signature. Via Offerman, Flanagan talks to us as if he’s presenting something profound when, instead, it scans as remedial. Call me a hater, so be it; this blitzkrieg of overwritten nicecore is just too much to stomach, though it’s probably just bad enough to be a serious Oscar contender.

In the frustrated words of many a Chuck character… it sucks.