Mr Harrigan’s Phone review – minor Stephen King gets minor Netflix treatment
The mostly quiet adaptation of Stephen King novella Mr Harrigan’s Phone is underscored by a distracting and familiar sound. It’s that desperate post-It scrape of the large barrel of stories he’s written, studios searching for third- and fourth-tier books to be dragged to the screen, an ungainly process that only serves to highlight the author’s weakest spots.
Recently, we’ve shrugged, the dull Adrien Brody-led Chapelwaite based on Jerusalem’s Lot, a damp remake of (a story that was never that interesting to begin with) and now, a thinly plotted 88-page short story becomes a bloated 106-minute Netflix movie, a competently made yet utterly inconsequential pre-Halloween time-waster. It’s stuck in that awkward place between two well-trodden King subgenres: small-town coming-of-age and small-town supernatural, never quite connecting as either. Too silly to be an involving drama and too subdued to be a creepy horror.
