Friday, November 8, 2019

Doctor Sleep Review - 2/3 of a great movie

Doctor Sleep Review

You don't know where your standing.

With that line, the Doctor Sleep turns what could have been a great climax, into a complete mess. Let's be clear, we all knew that this was not going to be as good as The Shining. Now, normally I would say that that shouldn't really matter, and that we should just take the movie for what it is. The problem is, is that the movie is unwilling to do that. So instead we end up with a movie that was banking too hard on people's love of The Shining to get them into the theater, that the movie ruins it's own story needlessly.
That's not to say that this is a bad movie. The first two thirds, although a bit chaotic at times, are actually pretty good. Ewan McGregor and Rebecca Ferguson are both great in their parts. Ewan McGregor nails an older Danny Torrance haunted by his experiences at the overlook hotel and Ferguson plays Rose the Hat with a lot of humanity and at moments you almost root for her to win until she suddenly switches into very creepy mode as soon as it is demanded of her. Honestly, most of the movie, the first act especially, would not have worked at all of these two actors had not brought their a-game. The other actors are passible. I can't exactly call them out for bad performances. The supporting cast all perform their roles as they need to be played, even if they do miss out on the emotional connection sometimes. The other lead character, Abra, played by Kyliech Curran, does about as well as can be expected from a child actress. The only real problem I have with the casting, is not a fact with the acting specifically, but rather the fact that the entirely wrong actors are playing them. Because, well, they decided to recast all the main characters from The Shining for flashbacks and hallucinations. And, except for Carl Lumbly playing Dick Halloran, they are all pretty awful, the worst being a character that appears later on who brings a near-insulting take to a famous character. And I get that this is neither Star Wars nor Marvel, and that facial reconstruction was very likely out of their budgetary restrictions, but just cut all that material please, because it looks and feels awful.
In general, the first two acts of Doctor Sleep, despite a couple missteps that are not impossible to ignore, have two great performances, an engaging story and several interesting ideas but feels like it should have been directed by Stanley Kubrick. If he wasn't dead, that is. From what I can tell, most of the movie follows pretty close to the book, albeit with a lot of cuts, and then suddenly swerves in the third act. As a result, most of the aforementioned interesting ideas are never really tied up in the end, and it feels like those scenes were just added in because they were part of the book, which then doesn't make any sense why they followed the book so closely in the beginning when the ending is so wildly different. I mean, I know why. They wanted the movie to connect more with The Shining so that they could sell more tickets, so they completely re-wrote the ending. Does that mean I think they should have stuck with a re-telling of Doctor Sleep? No. There are plenty of problems with the first two acts that could have been fixed, and despite the stumbling, I liked where the third act was going. So that's why I said that this movie should have been directed by Stanley Kubrick. If he had done to Doctor Sleep what he had done to The Shining, we could have had a really good film on our hands. Instead, what we're left with is a confused film that was too scared to venture too far away from it's source material, but also really, really wanted to be The Shining Part 2 instead of Doctor Sleep.

P.S. Also, is it just me, or was the movie way to fond of cross dissolves? It definitely felt like a third grader was editing the movie and found out that they could add transitions between scenes and got really excited but for some reason was only allowed to use the boring transition.

Personal Rating: 7/10
Entertainment: ⭐⭐⭐⭐☆
Depth: ⭐⭐☆☆☆
Story: ⭐☆☆☆☆
Comedy: ⭐☆☆☆☆
Tension: ⭐⭐⭐⭐☆
Acting: ⭐⭐⭐⭐☆
Directing: ⭐⭐⭐⭐☆

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