‘When the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers…’
I will watch any Stephen King adaptation and Netflix has a great track record in that area. Gerald’s Game, In the Tall Grass, 1922 – all of them have something to recommend them. Mr. Harrigan’s Phone is the latest on a production line that shows no signs of slowing down…
Craig (Jaeden Martell) is a good kid. He’s so good in fact that he is always level-headed, kind and considerate. To be brutally honest, there are no teenagers anywhere in the world like this kid. That aside, the fact remains that he is a good kid. This goes some way to explaining why he spends much of his spare time reading classic novels to a cantankerous and enigmatic old man named Mr. Harrigan (Donald Sutherland). Following Harrigan’s death, things get weird when Craig starts to receive odd messages from the phone that he bought for the old man shortly before he passed. Is there some kind of supernatural event happening here or just a cruel prank?
The general message seems to be that mobile phones are bad. King has explored this theme before, most notably with Cell, but he does so here in a way that is surprisingly sensible and reasonable. Wisely steering clear of social media, King and director John Lee Hancock instead focus on the possibilities of the phone itself. Instead of coming across as a dull older man lecturing the younger generation, Mr. Harrigan’s Phone prefers to relay its message in a way that is softer, and wrapped in a very human story to boot.
Martell is a veteran of the King universe having played Bill Denborough in the IT movies, and the tender scenes he shares with Sutherland are straight out of an ’80s family movie. And that’s partly the problem. This isn’t a horror film. It isn’t a family film. It isn’t a fantasy film. Instead, it’s an uneasy mish-mash of all three and the result is a movie that never really knows what it wants to be. There are nice moments here, and the dialogue, most of it lifted straight from the original short story, is vintage King, but there isn’t enough here to justify a standalone feature-length movie. There is a nagging feeling this project would work better as an episode within the anthology TV format.
Mr. Harrigan’s Phone is not a total bust, and there is enough to recommend it to King fans, but there is also no denying that it is probably the weakest King/Netflix collaboration so far. Hopefully, the next one (because there will inevitably be a next one and another next one and one more after that) will be more successful. Keep ’em coming.