Mr. Harrigan's Phone
| October 5, 2022 (United States)
Director: John Lee HancockWriter: John Lee Hancock, Stephen KingStars: Donald Sutherland, Jaeden Martell, Joe Tippett
Summary: When Mr. Harrigan dies, Craig, the teen who befriended and did odd jobs for him, puts his smart phone in his pocket before burial. When the lonely youth sends his dead friend a message, he i... Read all
Countries: United StatesLanguages: English
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Mr. Harrigan’s Phone 2022 Movie Review
Mr Harrigan’s Phone 2022, based on a novella by Stephen King, is mostly silent, yet a disturbing and all-too-familiar sound plays in the background. It’s that awkward post-it scrape of his big barrel of tales, as studios sift through them looking for third- and fourth-tier novels to pull to the screen.
A thinly plotted 88-page short story becomes a bloated 106-minute Netflix movie, a competently made yet utterly inconsequential pre-Halloween time-waster. This follows our shrugging through Pablo Larran’s visually arresting yet otherwise uninteresting Apple series Lisey’s Story, the dull Adrien Brody-led Chapelwaite based on Jerusalem’s Lot, and a damp remake of Firestarter (a story that was It tries to be both a small-town coming-of-age story and a small-town supernatural story, but it never quite succeeds at either. Not serious enough to be a gripping drama, and not tense enough to be a scary horror.
Star Jaeden Martell is brought on as head kid once more in an effort to win over some of the millions of people who made It: Chapter One the most commercially successful King adaptation of all time (it made a still rather staggering $700m worldwide). Martell plays Craig, a teenager who lives with his father in a small town in Maine. With a voiceover, he recalls his past with local wealthy Mr. Harrigan (Donald Sutherland), who paid him to read aloud as his sight deteriorated and became blind. Craig and Mr. Harrigan grow close throughout the years, and when he finally starts making his own money, he buys Mr. Harrigan his first iPhone as a gift. Then, when Harrigan passes away, he continues to use his new phone even in death, sending mysterious messages and phone calls to Craig. The sudden deaths of individuals Craig knew lead him to examine his circle of acquaintances.
The mystery of what attracted horror hit makers Blumhouse, with Ryan Murphy as producer and The Blind Side and The Founder’s John Lee Hancock as writer-director, is far more haunting than anything the film comes up with, and it’s bewildering that something as aggressively pedestrian as this would attract their attention. Anything that might initially intrigue ends up frustrating because Mr. Harrigan’s Phone has all the hallmarks of the very worst, most pointless examples of trying to stretch a relatively short novella to a full-length feature, including a lumbering pace, poorly developed characters, an absence of plot, and dialogue that feels like it’s been slowed down just to pad it out.
Perhaps things would have gone more smoothly if Hancock had chosen a tone and kept with it, but he’s never quite sure how he wants us to feel. It fails miserably as a horror-thriller and strangely underexplains its premise, and as a drama about adolescence, its characters aren’t developed enough for us to care. Hancock attempts to cram some shallow commentary on our over dependence on technology into the sluggish transitions between the two genres, but his analysis amounts to nothing more than an observer peering about at everyone engrossed in their phones and shaking their head in dismay. Poor phones, excellent books? OK, and? When seen through the lens of someone as Twitter-savvy as King, it all appears really stale.
It has a great sense of place, as King adaptations typically do, and good performances by Martell and Sutherland, but the film is so unbearably uninteresting that it should be disregarded immediately.