Stanley Kubrick brought the horrors of Stephen King’s thriller novel “The Shining” to the big screen in 1980.
The film is known as a horror classic and now, almost 40 years after its initial release, the sequel “Doctor Sleep,” gets its moment to expand on what was a classic.
If you are going into “Doctor Sleep” with the hopes of reliving the thrills that came with the Kubrick film, be prepared to be disappointed.
The film follows the adulthood of the original film’s character, Danny Torrance, as he struggles through life and realizes that there are more people in the world that “shine” like he does.
The film would be nearly impossible to follow if you have not seen “The Shining” because it uses nostalgia as a crutch to remind viewers the glory that was the original.
Director Mike Flanagan tries his best to capture the magic from the first film, but blunders painfully hard.
Scene after scene there are callbacks to Kubrick’s masterpiece, but with new actors pretending to be the original cast and doing so poorly, it was just all around uncomfortable to watch.
Aside from leaning too much on nostalgia, “Doctor Sleep” is a pacing mess filled with inconsistent tones that left me cringing in scenes rather than being scared.
In fact, I can say that not once in this film did I feel tense or scared through its two and a half hour runtime.
The only bright spot in the entire film is the amazing performance form Ewan McGregor as adult Danny Torrance.
McGregor portrays the pain and exhaustion that Torrance has had to go through living with the demons in his head and all his dialogue is delivered with power.
However, despite the execution of McGregor’s lines and character, there is absolutely no on screen chemistry whatsoever.
Every friendship and relationship feels forced and the dialogue made my skin crawl with how unnatural every conversation felt.
Characters would be in danger and at no point did I feel any fear to lose them. In truth, there were times that I wished they had died so I didn’t have to sit through their poor performances for another minute.
The worst performance by far came from Rebecca Ferguson who plays the antagonist in the film, Rose the Hat.
Ferguson fell victim to overacting the entire film, making her seem like a cartoon character rather than someone that existed in the same universe as the serious tone that McGregor portrayed.
The constant tonal changes between her scenes and his was jarring.
If the film cut everything except for parts when McGregor was on screen, it would’ve been a fantastic movie.
Moving past the awful acting, the ending of the film could possibly be one of the most predictable finishes to a film I’ve ever seen.
The climax was so calculable that when it happened I was in pure shock by the fact that the filmmakers were this lazy to actually execute it.
I can’t fully blame the movie too much when it comes to the synopsis since the film is based on a novel, but Kubrick changed plenty of plot points in the original film, so Flanagan should have done the same.
“Doctor Sleep” is a major disappointment for King fans in the wake of a breakthrough of King film adaptations.
As a major King fan myself I can wholeheartedly say that I wish this film was never made.
