☆☆
Stanley Kubrick made an aggressively, obsessively weird movie in The Shining, a film that utilized his love of cinema, puzzles and design to come up with something that was under-appreciated in its time and has grown to be a classic. It is entirely fair to compare Doctor Sleep with The Shining, since the movie invites and welcomes comparisons. On every level, Doctor Sleep is woefully inferior.
If Kubrick freely adapted The Shining into a capital-F Film, director Mike Flanagan makes Doctor Sleep into a lower-case movie that might be perfectly at home on, say, FX. It's as literal as Kubrick's movie was obtuse, and if you haven't seen the 1980 original, Doctor Sleep will make absolutely no sense; if you have, Doctor Sleep feels extraneous.
Instead of the hyper-focused fixation on family dynamics in the first film, Doctor Sleep bounces around between three stories, including one in which we get to see a little boy brutally tortured and murdered on camera while he screams for help. Throughout, there are weird, distracting re-creations of actors from the first movie, but the plot remains strictly in Stephen King good-versus-evil territory.
There are occasional hints that it's all really about now-grown Danny Torrance (Ewan MacGregor) exorcising his demons, but it's so jumbled and intentionally reverential to Kubrick's film that nothing makes much sense. King famously hates Kubrick's movie, but this one makes the fatal flaw that one never did: It's dull. This Doctor may indeed put you to sleep.
Viewed Nov. 9, 2019 -- AMC Century City
1930
If Kubrick freely adapted The Shining into a capital-F Film, director Mike Flanagan makes Doctor Sleep into a lower-case movie that might be perfectly at home on, say, FX. It's as literal as Kubrick's movie was obtuse, and if you haven't seen the 1980 original, Doctor Sleep will make absolutely no sense; if you have, Doctor Sleep feels extraneous.
Instead of the hyper-focused fixation on family dynamics in the first film, Doctor Sleep bounces around between three stories, including one in which we get to see a little boy brutally tortured and murdered on camera while he screams for help. Throughout, there are weird, distracting re-creations of actors from the first movie, but the plot remains strictly in Stephen King good-versus-evil territory.
There are occasional hints that it's all really about now-grown Danny Torrance (Ewan MacGregor) exorcising his demons, but it's so jumbled and intentionally reverential to Kubrick's film that nothing makes much sense. King famously hates Kubrick's movie, but this one makes the fatal flaw that one never did: It's dull. This Doctor may indeed put you to sleep.
Viewed Nov. 9, 2019 -- AMC Century City
1930
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