Mr. Harrigan's Phone Review

Stephen King movies are almost more prevalent than the novels or short stories they're based on. Hell Wikipedia has a page dedicated to the adaptations- that's how many there are. And yet almost always being set in Maine, they're rarely actually filmed there; if I were governor of the state, I'd set up some law that all films based on his work be filmed in Vacationland. Think of the business it'd do!

Yet despite his ubiquitousness, I've never actually read any of his work. I am unfamiliar with his writing style and have only the umptieth cinematic versions to form my opinion on. Is he any good? He has to be, name one other writer as famous as him. Go ahead, I'll wait.

What does any of this have to do with "Mr. Harrigan's Phone," which just debuted on Netflix? Obviously it's another project based on something of his, a novella this time, and boy does it stink. Is it Mr. King's fault? I doubt it. Sure he executively produced it, and yeah maybe his story was flimsy to begin with, but for over an hour and a half I sat on my couch waiting for the promised "horror teen thriller drama," and what we get is a lot of wasted celluloid.

Donald Sutherland plays Mr. Harrigan, a wealthy old man who pays Craig (Jaeden Martell) something like five bucks to read to him a few times a week. They hit it off, not because the script gives them anything interesting to say or do but because these are two talented performers. Hell Sutherland is such a heavy he could have chemistry with a potted plant.

Anyway, Harrigan gives Craig a scratch ticket several times throughout the year, and after many years he finally strikes it rich, or well, as rich as a couple grand feels like to a teenager. He buys the old man a cell phone, who argues that it has radiation and can corrupt minds and all that. It's all stereotypical talk about fearing technology that Hollywood thinks every elderly person suffers from, but I digress.

Harrigan dies not long after, but if my calculations are correct, we're halfway through the runtime, and all we've seen are two professional actors doing their job by being professionals. They have no interesting conversations, solve no problems, just talk, talk, talk.

It's explained that Craig does have problems in school with bullies and all that standard stuff, but without Mr. Harrigan's ear to listen, he feels no one will listen. What does he do? He calls his cellphone to grieve about whatever petty thing is going on in his fake movie life, but then the bodies start to pile. Well it's a small pile but it's a pile nonetheless. The people who did him dirty start to die, and Craig believes it's Mr. Harrigan.

How is that possible? Even the film doesn't know, because it's never explained. There's no tension because we know the author, we expect the supernatural. But writer/director John Lee Hancock fails to establish an fascinating atmosphere or pacing, so we get a lot of nothing, and even when something does happen, the audience's lost interest.