‘Nothing seems to last. But the bullet. The bullet is constant…’
No other filmmaker has adapted Stephen King more than Mick Garris. Having adapted King on seven different occasions (including TV adaptations), Garris has somehow managed to make a bunch of adaptations that have had no cultural impact whatsoever. He is better known as a general horror personality than for his actual filmmaking. He also known for working with big franchises having written or directed films for The Fly, Critters, and Psycho, but it’s never the entries that become renowned. Riding the Bullet, Garris’ fifth King adaptation, encapsulates Garris’ filmmaking style and oeuvre – for better and worse…
Adapted from King’s horror novella of the same name (from his 2002 short story collection Everything’s Eventual), Riding the Bullet, presents us with Alan Parker (Jonathan Jackson), a young artist studying at the University of Maine. Shortly before Halloween, and on the eve of a breakup with his girlfriend, Jessica (Erika Christensen), Alan contemplates suicide. He is shocked out of his stupor when he learns that his mother (Barbara Hershey) has had a stroke and become seriously ill. Determined to make it back to her, Alan tries to hitchhike back home, and in the classic tradition, he is picked up by someone who may or may not be a ghost (David Arquette). Think Tom Waits’ ‘Big Joe and Phantom 309’, if Big Joe was a bit of a tool.
The problem with Riding the Bullet, as with many adaptations of novellas or short stories, is that there simply isn’t enough book to justify a feature length film. King’s original novella is not particularly long, indeed, it is its simplicity that makes it so effective. Garris pads the source material out so much that Arquette’s character George Straub, central to the novella, doesn’t even appear until the 54 minute mark. Admittedly, when he does finally show up, things immediately improve. Arquette is far and away the best thing about this film, far eclipsing a moody and forgettable turn from Jackson, and there is a hint in the third act of how good this could have been had it been adapted as a short film or perhaps as an episode of a horror anthology series. Garris also inelegantly gets around the problem of much of the novella being delivered as an inner monologue by having two Jonathan Jacksons interacting with each other to get across his inner thoughts and feelings. It doesn’t really work. The whole film comes across more goofy than scary, akin to something like Pet Sematary 2 or even, dare I say, Freddy’s Dead. The difference being that those two films arrived in the early ’90s whereas this was released in 2004. It must have felt dated even then.
Riding the Bullet is not a bad adaptation at all. I mostly enjoyed it, and at its best, it really gets to the heart of what makes King’s novella so effective. Unfortunately, it struggles to maintain that standard across its 98 minute run time.
