To be sure, there is too much stuffed into The Green Mile - woozy ideas about redemption, an affected sense of awe - and as touching as Duncan’s portrayal of Coffey is, Darabont treats the character like a simplistic, irritatingly naïve beacon of goodness. Tom Hanks plays Paul, a death-row prison guard who treats his job with near-religious solemnity, and Oscar-nominee Michael Clarke Duncan is John Coffey, his newest inmate, who just so happens to have magical powers.
And yet, if you can get past all that, this adaptation is surprisingly emotional and sensitively acted. The Green Mile, with its three-hours-plus run time, might as well be exhibit A for Hollywood’s myriad overlong, self-important Oscar-bait dramas. If part of the secret to The Shawshank Redemption’s success was that it told an epic story with a scarcity of bombast, Frank Darabont’s follow-up film is where he starts to get a little too big for his britches. But Kölsch and Widmyer weave some mighty fine mood, which means this good-enough adaptation is still miles better than most films devoted to King’s work. Like too much modern horror, the remake indulges in lame jump scares and questionable plotting. And finally, it’s those twists on King’s book, which we won’t reveal, that allow the film to find its own creepy, despairing tone. In addition, this Pet Sematary has a much better cast, led by Jason Clarke as a rock-steady patriarch who doesn’t believe in an afterlife until he discovers that his backyard is home to a cemetery that can resurrect the dead - sort of.
The first is that this remake manages to be more consistently unnerving and mournful, really sinking its teeth into a dark fundamental truth: Even the most levelheaded of people simply cannot let go of the past or the loved ones they lose along the way. Taking liberties with the source material, directors Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer have crafted a superior Pet Sematary to the 1989 version, for several reasons. Maybe everything that dies someday comes back. But the film never really gets out of the blocks - it comes across as merely the vague notion of what an epic spectacle should look like, but without the audacity, vision, or soul of one. The Dark Tower has gotten the stamp of approval from King, and the movie has cheeky blink-and-you’ll-miss-‘em references to other King works like The Shining, 1408, and The Shawshank Redemption. But we have plenty of complaints with Matthew McConaughey, who plays the Man in Black as if he’s still doing his goddamn suave-mumbling-mystic routine from his terrible Lincoln ads. We have no complaint with Idris Elba as the badass, square-jawed Gunslinger, who takes awkward teen Jake Chambers (Tom Taylor) under his wing, quickly realizing he has the power to destroy the Dark Tower and, consequently, the universe. Actually, that’s what’s most disappointing about the finished film: At least if it had been outright terrible, it might have been more memorable.
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(For the purposes of this list, we looked at theatrical releases only, and excluded Lawnmower Man, an “adaptation” so vastly different from the original that King sued to get his name off it.) With one notable exception, you’ll find the adapted movies turned out much like King himself: They got more serious and substantial with age.Īfter years of false starts and, more recently, months of bad buzz, the long-anticipated adaptation of King’s beloved Dark Tower series proves to be kinda dull, in the most inoffensive way imaginable. Nonetheless, with the latest King adaptation, a remake of Firestarter, now in theaters, we gave it the old college try.
As his canvas (and reputation) has expanded over the years, his work has been turned into dramas, comedies, musicals, and even a Bollywood movie.īecause of this dissonance, ranking King movies is particularly difficult: The Mangler and The Shawshank Redemption barely seem to exist on the same plane of dimensional existence, let alone on the same list of movies. Sure, a lot of them are horror (certainly a lot of the worst are horror), but that’s largely because the boom period for King movies was the 1980s, when he was known solely as a horror writer. Stephen King’s work has been adapted so many times - sometimes by King himself - that it’s impossible to find a single unifying thread in all of the film adaptations. This story originally ran in 2017 and has been updated for the release of Firestarter.
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