Life of Chuck

It honestly boggles my mind how I kept reading about how this movie was bombing at the box office, when it clearly was very poorly marketed. It was two weeks after its "wide" release before it finally showed up to our local art house/second run movie theater. The chain multiplexes gave it a complete miss.

Mike Flanagan is a very talented screenwriter and director and this was possibly Stephen King's most sentimental work. And there's two INCREDIBLE dance scenes. The result is completely human, uplifting film.

There is some anxiety inducing story in the start of the film, but it is not a horror film by any measure. King is also very good with general fiction too, after all.

This movie will stick with you for awhile. Hours after my viewing, I was still thinking about it (and tearing up.)

There is a concept here about the truth: we live, and then we die, and because I know it's a movie based on a story by Stevn King it has me asking the question: which am I more afrriad of?

I know the ambiguous trailer did not seem like anything you would expect from a Steven King movie, but what I got is exactly why this dude is The Master of Horror.

Maybe I am reading too much into a film, possibly influenced far greater by Mike Flanagan's filmmaking, yet the emotion I felt for this movie was deep.

That's the brilliance of this movie, I felt something at the end, and it made me think, and it was beautiful for that.

It's everything I expected from a movie/

I feel like this movie had all the parts to make it a beautiful experience, but it failed to put them together properly. The initial mystery in act 1 is quite intriguing and makes you wonder, what this kind-looking man Chuck, that keeps popping up in advertisements all over the world has to do with the planets looming demise. But acts 2 and 3 (or 2 and 1, as the movie decides to engage in "reverse" storytelling) fail to convey a coherent story or motive. It is all losely held together by the premise of "being your true self" and "you are all the things that you experience and all the memories that you make" but the way these themes are shown are on the one hand to vague to truly get you invested, but on the other hand also riddled in clichees. The grandpa giving a discouraging speech to the kid about how it is more important to stick to tangible things like math, than to creative aspirations. The teacher giving a 5 minute talk to his ex-wife about "how we are only a blip second in the eternity that is the universe". The kid finally overcoming his fears of expressing himself at the most clichee high-school graduation dance scene of all time. It has the topics that are supposed to make you cry and feel hopeful at the same time, but they feel like you have seen them before a million times in better stories. And the most intriguing part of the plot, the most profound experience that the main character must have had had throughout his entire life is only revealed to us in the final scene. It would have been great to see, how this would have shaped his actions going forward, but in the timeline of the movie, we only get one scene of him afterwards. And while it includes an impressive dance choreography, it is not enough to fully capture the character´s whole underlying motivation. And the overall explanation of the initial mystery also kind of falls flat.

I left the cinema feeling nothing.

I so very much enjoy Tom Hiddleston in films. Karen Gillan is also a treat to watch in selected films. The rest of the cast is worth more than an honorable mention alone, as many familiar faces grace the screen (especially toward the beginning of the film). Lastly, I tend to love this 'type' of movie. I can't give too much away without using a spoiler tag, but if you watch the interview(s) with the cast featured here on IMDB, you'll know what "type" I am referring to. I wonder if I can get away with 'apocalyptic', since that is a word straight from one of these interviews.

That said ... it was a bit of a letdown for me.

The beginning was slow, but it was good. It built an expectancy toward so much more and a feeling that it was going to get so much better. Sadly, that was never fully realized or delivered.

Beginning in the second act, the film definitely starts to bog down and suffers from side or follow-up scenes that are just way too long and a bit far-fetched. The narration, too, is used far too often to the point of it just about verging on annoying.

By the third act, when they begin to introduce what is supposed to be the point of the entire thing, it has already been too bogged down by too much of not enough - if that makes sense. While the child actor is adorable and does so well, here too the movie just drags.

Moreover, everything is so overly-EXPLAINED. It's kind of like Flanagan did not trust the audience to understand what was happening, so either the narrator or characters went to great lengths to explain every detail. Well, while some may disagree, I believe audiences are more intelligent than this film gives them (us) credit for.

Sorry Mike Flanagan fans, but this is the third time I have been let down by one of his offerings. :(

I went into The Life of Chuck knowing nothing about it other than it being a Stephen King novella.

I assumed the movie was going to be horror, and I was so wrong, in the best way. Mike Flanagan was a director I was unfamiliar with as well - so my expectations were really empty.

That being said - The Life of Chuck took the beats of what makes a great horror film - fleshed out and relatable characters with a unique and mysterious situation to put them in.

I want to leave my critique relatively vague as I believe the hook of the film works best going in without knowing much.

I left the film feeling a mix of joy and melancholy and appreciated the artistry that brought me there.

I do recommend.