The mostly quiet adaptation of Stephen King novella Mr Harrigan’s Phone is underscored by a distracting and familiar sound. It’s that desperate post-It scrape of the large barrel of stories he’s written, studios searching for third- and fourth-tier books to be dragged to the screen, an ungainly process that only serves to highlight the author’s weakest spots.
Recently, we’ve shrugged our way through Pablo Larraín’s visually arresting yet otherwise uninteresting Apple series Lisey’s Story, the dull Adrien Brody-led Chapelwaite based on Jerusalem’s Lot, a damp remake of Firestarter (a story that was never that interesting to begin with) and now, a thinly plotted 88-page short story becomes a bloated 106-minute Netflix movie, a competently made yet utterly inconsequential pre-Halloween time-waster. It’s stuck in that awkward place between two well-trodden King subgenres: small-town coming-of-age and small-town supernatural, never quite connecting as either. Too silly to be an involving drama and too subdued to be a creepy horror.
In a hope to sway some of the millions who made It: Chapter One the most commercially successful King adaptation of all time (it made a still rather staggering $700m worldwide), star Jaeden Martell is recruited as head kid again, this time playing Craig, a teen living with his father in a small town in Maine. He’s taking us back, via voiceover, through his relationship with local millionaire Mr Harrigan (Donald Sutherland), who hired him as a kid to read out loud as his sight disintegrated. Over the years the pair become closer and when Craig gets some money of his own, he treats Mr Harrigan to his first iPhone. When Harrigan then dies, his addiction to his new phone extends beyond the grave, with Craig still receiving calls and cryptic texts. When people start dying, Craig begins to question who he was friends with.
It’s kind of befuddling why something as aggressively pedestrian as this would attract the attention of horror hit-makers Blumhouse, Ryan Murphy as producer and The Blind Side and The Founder’s John Lee Hancock as writer-director, the mystery of what would lure them in proving far more haunting than anything the film comes up with. Stretching a relatively short novella to a full-length feature is too often a fool’s errand and Mr Harrigan’s Phone bears the hallmarks of the very worst, most pointless examples – a lumbering pace, poorly developed characters, an absence of plot, dialogue that feels as if it’s been slowed down just to pad it all out – and so anything that might initially intrigue ends up frustrating instead.
Perhaps if Hancock had picked a tone and stuck with it, things might have felt a little smoother but he’s never able to figure out what he wants us to feel. As a horror-thriller, it’s woefully ineffective and curiously underexplained and as a drama about adolescence, it’s too thinly etched for us to care. In between the languid back-and-forth between the two genres, Hancock tries to stuff in some puddle-deep commentary about our overreliance on technology which is about as complex as someone looking around at everyone on their phones and shaking their head in dismay. Phones bad, books good? OK, and? For someone as Twitter-literate as King, it all seems a little tired.
It’s solidly acted by Martell and Sutherland, although the latter seems as desperate as we are to let loose and have a bit more fun, and has a confident sense of place as King adaptations often do but it’s all rather unforgivably dull, a call to be swiftly ignored.
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Mr Harrigan’s Phone is now available on Netflix