Mr. Harrigan's Phone

I'm really not sure what to make of this. It has so many disparate elements that never come together the way I assume they would or should, but they do come together in other ways. Is it fair to judge a movie for what it fails to do when I'm not sure it was intending on doing what I expected in the first place? It's like getting mad that a basketball doesn't fit in a baseball glove. Phone has a, frankly, bloated concept. It is from Stephen King, who, while I love, is challenged to write a simple story. Every King recipe has to have 100 ingredients. Craig is hired by an old, ruthless capitalist to read books to him three days a week, starting when Craig is around 12 and through his teen years. They form a bond over time, and thanks to a winning scratch-off lotto ticket, Craig gets Harrigan an iPhone. When Harrigan dies, Craig puts the phone in Harrigan's casket. He misses Harrigan and "calls" him, and in doing so, finds out he can more or less summon Harrigan's ghost to exact revenge on people. See what I mean about a bloated concept? That's the stuff of a Roger Waters concept album. And I left out things, like Craig having lost his mother at 12, or the bully (it's a Stephen King story, so there's always a bully), or how other people see Harrigan (rich and evil), or the teacher that inspires him (and there may be a crush?), or the closet of secrets in Harrigan's house. And I didn't even mention his three friends, or the girl he kind of crushes on; combined, they may get four lines. I've seen victims killed off in the pre-credit sequence of a slasher movie with more depth. There's a lot for what seems like either a simple coming-of-age story, or a mysterious, unexplained story of supernatural stuff. But it never quite commits to either. It takes more than half the movie for Harrigan to die anyway, so it doesn't leave much room for the phone-calls-from-the-dead angle to develop. Craig's coming of age story doesn't seem like a consequence of the events in the movie so much as just growing up, save for one aspect I'll get to in a moment. It gives the movie a feeling of traveling without direction. It's moving forward, but to what end is unclear. But that brings me back to the thought it may not be what I assume it is. It may be about Craig's inability to process grief through much of the movie, and how he has to come accept it, feel it, and move on, and that's a decent story. But it also isn't given much time to spread its wings. But it also could be about the effect of technology and our phones and the internet and the hold it has on us. The movie takes place in the mid to late 00's, so the idea of smartphones is new. There's a moment where Harrigan sees Craig's phone and envisions how the internet could become a never-ending fountain of disinformation, a disruption to the economy, a way to foster dissent and corrupt the minds of the naive, and so many more things we know came to be real, but it all feels so very on the nose. And the aspect of how much it has a hold on us doesn't really get explored beyond Harrigan's frankly preposterous oracular vision, as the phone only comes into play when Craig is communicating with Harrigan's ghost. So much of this movie is wrapped up in developing the relationship between Craig and Harrigan, and it's necessary, but because it eats up so much runtime, it leaves very little room for any exploration of the themes and ideas it wants to discuss. The last 45 minutes whipsaw through so many plot points, and nothing has much time to make an impact. It's acted and directed well, but the script just never finds the balance it needs to walk the tightrope in front of it. I guess that's the movie's failing; it's not that it isn't what I expected, or that what I got was a bad idea, but that everything it tried to do came out half-baked. It feels like the first episode of a series in the first hour, with a highlights reel of the rest of the season making up the last 45 minutes. It's never bad, but it never becomes what it should have or could have been.