Review: ‘The Life of Chuck' is Stephen King at his worst
'The Life of Chuck' is so earnest and sincerely made that it will probably be mistaken for a good movie by most people. Viewers may assume they're not enjoying it because there's something wrong with them — when really the movie is a badly arranged, scattered and mostly dull assemblage of phony merchandise.
Based on a novella by Stephen King, the movie is told in three acts, shown in reverse chronological order. Unfortunately, the 'third' act, which is presented first, is the only section that's reasonably interesting. The 'second' act is merely watchable; and the 'first' and final act, is too long, plodding and sentimental.
'The Life of Chuck' begins as a seeming commentary on everything the world has experienced since COVID, though to King's credit, his novella was written pre-COVID and published in 2020. It presents a world in which every system, natural and man-made, is falling apart. And just like what happened with COVID, the shift from normal life to extreme-crisis mode happens in a brief span of time.
Chiwetel Ejiofor plays a schoolteacher trying to maintain a routine, while sink holes are opening up in the ground, the internet is failing, the power grid is collapsing and the night sky is looking strange. To add to the weirdness, there are posters and TV commercials everywhere celebrating a fellow named Chuck (Tom Hiddleston), though nobody knows who Chuck is.
Curiously, though we soon find out everything about Chuck (lots more than we want to know, in fact), the movie never tells us the one thing that we do want to know about him, which is why his face is everywhere as the world is coming to an end.
There is a dramaturgical lesson to be gleaned from 'The Life of Chuck': If you begin with the apocalypse, everything that follows is an anti-climax. It would be easier to care about Chuck's concerns if something cataclysmic weren't happening to everybody else. But that's just how it is with all of us and the apocalypse. It feels personal.
The second section contains the movie's one genuinely good scene, in which Chuck, a buttoned-down man of about 40, starts dancing with polish and abandon to the rhythms provided by a street busker playing the drums. Hiddleston moves beautifully, and it's an altogether lovely set piece.
But the final section goes back in time to Chuck's boyhood, and the movie degenerates into a sappy evocation of the past, with a very young Chuck living with his drunken grandfather (Mark Hamill) and learning how to dance. Really? Director and co-screenwriter Mike Flanagan must be a very nice guy, to assume he can involve an audience with such trivia, after they've more or less witnessed their own destruction.
All the advertising for 'The Life of Chuck' has referred to it as 'life-affirming,' but this may be akin to referring to someone old as 'ageless' or dead as 'immortal' — that is, a comforting lie.
The movie is maudlin and pessimistic and features a mildly sardonic voiceover narration by Nick Offerman that only serves to distance us from the action. Offerman is a good, appealing and versatile actor, but the use of his voice in narration is already becoming a cliché, like the voice of Morgan Freeman in documentaries.
With all this in mind, there's no way to recommend 'The Life of Chuck.'
However, if you do decide to see it, here's some advice: Watch the entire first section, not as though it's actually happening but as though it's a projection of Chuck's imagination. That would at least explain the primacy of Chuck in the movie's cosmic scheme and also reconcile some of the movie's chronological inconsistencies.
Watching the movie in that way might also make the story more comprehensible and its emphases more justified. Yet it won't ameliorate the movie's dramatic inertia or, even worse, its unrelenting air of self-satisfied wistfulness.
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