‘We know what happens to today when it becomes yesterday…’
I’ve now watched most adaptations of Stephen King’s work, and, until recently, I strongly believed that nothing could ever be worse than Nikolaj Arcel’s execrable adaptation of The Dark Tower. Then I saw The Langoliers. Now, the main issue with The Dark Tower is that the source material is incredible, and the film adaptation totally fudged all the potential to make something great. The Langoliers, on the other hand, is one of King’s worst novellas, and yet, this TV adaptation somehow takes a bad novella and makes it considerably worse…
The premise for The Langoliers is solid. After falling asleep on a red-eye flight from Los Angeles to Boston, several passengers and one of the pilots awaken to find that everyone else on the plane has disappeared. It would make a good episode of The Twilight Zone. It has absolutely no business being 180 (!) minutes long, however.
Let’s talk about the cast. Bronson Pinchot does some great work as psychotic maniac, Craig Toomy (also the only interesting character in the source material), Dean Stockwell is pretty good as mystery writer, Bob Jenkins, and David Morse and Frankie Faison don’t disgrace themselves either (although the former seems faintly embarrassed throughout and the latter is woefully underused). Everyone else in this piece of shit is atrocious. Now, I’ve acted the fool a few times in my life, but it should be noted I’ve never done any professional (or amateur) acting, so my criticism here comes from a place of knowing that all these people are much more talented than me, but honestly… The Langoliers boasts some of the most wooden and unconvincing acting I’ve ever seen. Mark Lindsay Chapman is barely watchable as British secret agent, Nick Hopewell (perhaps King’s worst ever character), Christopher Collet stinks the place out as young violinist, Ace Kaussner, and Patricia Wettig is barely present at all as school teacher, Laurel Stevenson. Any of these performances in isolation would be bad enough, but as an ensemble, it’s painful.
Perhaps the most surprising thing here is that this awful adaptation is adapted by a very talented writer-director. Tom Holland wrote and directed Child’s Play and Fright Night, two horror classics, and also worked on Psycho II and Thinner (a much better King adaptation than this one). And yet, it has to be said that his work here is unforgivable. The adaptation ends with a freeze-frame of the surviving characters literally jumping up in the air and shouting ‘Yeah!’. Reader, I almost wept. Aside from everything else, Holland’s folly also features some of the absolute worst CGI ever committed to film or television (or indeed, conjured up in anyone’s imagination). There are Nintendo games from the ’80s with more realistic and frightening computer effects than this. When the titular langoliers finally arrive, it’s genuinely quite sad. It’s a bit like eating a terrible meal and then being presented with a steaming pile of dog shit for dessert straight afterwards.
It’s time to wrap this up before I do myself a mischief, but let me say this in no uncertain terms – this is not just the worst King adaptation in terms of quality, it’s one of the worst anythings ever. A reminder that this is 180 minutes long. 180 MINUTES. It’s tantamount to a war crime – absolutely hideous from top to bottom.
