Doctor Sleep

Have you ever been in a restaurant and tried an exotic dish based solely on liking the individual components in it? You see a sirloin marinated in a chipotle coffee cream sauce, served with walnuts and capers and think "oh, I like all that, combining it must be amazing". And then you taste it and it turns out the whole is lesser than the individual parts. That's Doctor Sleep. I should like it based on its individual components. It's got Mike Flanagan at the helm. I've seen several of his movies (Absentia, Oculus, Hush, and Gerald's Game), and I can't think of one I haven't enjoyed. The man knows what the essentials of a horror movie are and how to craft them. I like Ewan McGregor. Even if hearing him do an American accent is disconcerting, he's an excellent actor. I've never seen him phone it in, and he doesn't do that here. Middle-aged Dan Torrance is an alcoholic and a drifter. The horrors from the Overlook live in his mind, both figuratively and literally, in lockboxes he's crafted to keep them from haunting his waking hours. McGregor brings to life the struggles I'd expect to see in a grown Danny, fighting not to become his father, haunted by ghosts, and as he tries to rebuild his life, trying not to get sucked into a situation with connections to his shining abilities that could threaten others. Dan is a fleshed-out, three-dimensional character (more than Kubrick's Jack Torrance ever was), and it's on the shoulders of McGregor that he comes to life. I like Rebecca Ferguson. Like McGregor, I've never seen her give anything less than 100%, even when the material wasn't worth the effort. I haven't read the novel, but knowing King's writing as well as I do, I imagine Ferguson smoothed out some of Rose the Hat's quirkier or more provocative edges, fleshing her out a little more as a character. She's a bad guy, sure, but Ferguson makes it easy to see the frightened child inside Rose that wants everything perfect, and never wants to grow old. And I like Stephen King. Yes, he has tropes he leans on way too much, but he can tell a compelling story when he gets his ducks in a row, and often manages to weave in explorations of real-world themes into the narrative. With Doctor Sleep, he uses Dan as a way to explore the idea of if people are locked onto a course because of the mistakes of their parents, forgiveness, and personal growth. This should make for a fantastic movie. And yet, I found the combination is somehow lesser than the individual parts, and it all comes back to the one element that ties them together: the plot. King's plots, even at his best, can sometimes stretch themselves thin to cover unnecessary length or accommodate equally unnecessary bloat, and Doctor Sleep does both of those. Fully half of this two and a half hour movie feels dedicated to set-up; not build, mind you, not setting a mood, not a slow drip of tension, just getting the characters and story beats aligned to actually begin the plot. It's like listening to someone restart a joke over and over; by the time the plot actually kicked into gear, I no longer cared. It didn't help that, when the plot was finally ready to begin, it not only felt stuck on rails, but made some of the dumbest choices possible. Dan and Abra (a young girl Dan befriends that also has the shining) are convinced they can't beat Rose, despite Abra single-handedly outsmarting and out-shining Rose on more than one occasion. The big plan Dan has for taking out Rose's cult of followers? An ambush with hunting rifles. Why do the dedicate so much time to the recruiting of Snakebite Andi and then bench her for most of the movie after? Why do the shining powers constantly seem to be in a state of evolution? Why is there a reference to The Dark Tower?!? And do they shoehorn in a trip back to the Overlook in some kind of forced full-circle moment? You know they do. The Kubrick worship goes from seasoning to the entire dish at this point, fully ending any attempt Doctor Sleep could've made to establish its own identity. Even if I liked Kubrick's movie (and I don't), the slavish worship is overbearing, and uncharacteristic of Flanagan. This is the kind of lazy, "Señor Spielbergo" copycatting I'd expect out of a formless hack like Brian de Palma, not someone who has shown their own directorial identity time and again. On top of all this, the movie is just BORING. Flanagan even seems to know this, giving all the scenes of one person going into another's mind the kind of visual flair you'd see in an MCU movie like Doctor Strange. This doesn't change the fact that a fair portion of this movie is watching people think real hard. That is exactly as riveting as it sounds. It doesn't help that, as I mentioned, the capabilities seem to shift on a whim. Dan can trap actual ghosts in lockboxes in his head. They can invade each other's minds at will, and damage done in the ... mind-scape? ... can manifest in the real world, but only sometimes. Abra can track the locations of Rose and her cult like a human GPS in one scene without any issue, but in another, needs an item connected to them, which for some reason is the baseball mitt of a boy the cult kidnaps and murders. There don't seem to be any rules to the power sets, just whatever the scene needs in the moment, which robs the movie of any sense of stakes. And for a movie being about not being fated by familial lineage, Doctor Sleep feels stuck on rails the entire time, hurtling towards a climax so obvious, it almost feels like a red herring because it's TOO obvious. I get why some people like this movie, especially those who love Kubrick's Shining. But this did not work for me. It's not outright bad, but I never felt sucked in (late-career King isn't his top form), and more important, I never felt that this story necessitated being a sequel to The Shining. I know for King, this movie was an attempt to right some of the wrongs he felt Kubrick made, and I'm glad he got that chance. But I wish it could've been done without being so unbelievably dull.