'M. Harrigan's Phone review: A dead billionaire texts a dull teenager in a terrible Stephen King adaptation

Stephen King has written many insightful and chilling stories about moral strength, lost innocence, and the psychic battle between good and evil that has raged since the dawn of time. His 2020 novel “Mr. Harrigan's Phone" - an anti-tech fable about a teenager who befriends a reclusive billionaire, buys the old man an iPhone, slips the device into his coffin when he dies for some reason, then begins receiving Disturbing text messages from the same number after the funeral - certainly not one of them Such back-of-the-drawer source material proves to be an insurmountable inconvenience for the Netflix adaptation of the same name by John Lee Hancock, a downcast supernatural drama utterly appalling that somehow fails to extract even a moment of enjoyment from a cautionary tale based on the idea that your smartphone could literally be a portal to hell.

The first problem is that "Mr. Harrigan's Phone" doesn't even begin to address this idea until it's already too late, as the majority of Hancock's moribund script is devoted to an awkward crossover between "Tuesdays with Morrie" and the least convincing portrayal of the American high school experience since the days of "She's All That" (I'm still mad at Hollywood for making me believe that R&B superstar Usher Raymond could DJ my walk of the bio lab in history class). But where this timeless masterpiece was carried by the himbo charisma of Freddie Prinze Jr. at the height of his powers, this lifeless slog is anchored to "It" star Jaeden Martell, who gives a performance main so whimpering and empty that you can't help but sympathize with her character's (ridiculously cartoonish) bully.

The story begins in 2003, when digital technology is just beginning to take over the small town of Harlow, Maine, where Craig (whose pre-teen incarnation is played by Colin O'Brien) lives with his father widowed and apparently nameless. (Joe Tippet). One absurd detail in a film that has no other: the kids at Craig's school end up forming cliques based on the type of smartphone they own, with the heads of Razr sitting at a table, BlackBerry users to another, and so on - all the zombified teenagers look at their screens like Instagram was already invented and they're not just playing Snake or whatever.

Anyway, Craig can't afford a phone, which is why he's so receptive to a random offer from local Scrooge, Mr. Harrigan (Donald Sutherland, 86, a presence at the towering screen in a role that rarely requires him to get up). The deal is as simple as it is bizarre: Every week, Craig will read classic books to Harrigan at his mansion. "Heart of Darkness." "Crime and Punishment." "The Jungle" by Upton Sinclair. All ripped from the library shelves of someone who's all too comfortable with their personal canon - someone who has little interest in exposing themselves to anything new towards the end. of his life.



For Craig, it's a steady job after school and a literary education by osmosis. According to Martell's monotone voiceover, it's also an escape from the helplessness Craig feels in the real world - the same helplessness that kept him from saving his mother's life - but this seemingly crucial part of the equation is forgotten even faster than the rest of this film is intended to be. For Harrigan, whose own eyes can no longer bear the fatigue of reading anything other than a stock quote, the arrangement offers…company, perhaps? The guy isn't exactly an open book. The few insights Hancock provides for the character are perversely dismissed to a degree that screams "we care, it's just streaming", even if Sutherland is able to weaponize Harrigan's loneliness in a way that suggests its own checkered history of heartbreak and resentment. /p>

Don't expect to know the specifics, as "Mr. Harrigan's Phone" is less interested in digging below the surface - or generating a cohesive sense of conflict, for that matter - than he is in the Craig's repetitive confrontations with his bully (Cyrus Arnold), the strange sexual tension that seems to develop between our hero and his favorite teacher (Kirby Howell-Baptiste), and details of consumer technology around 2008, when the much of this story unfolds. The chaotic plot only threatens to take shape when Craig gets his hands on a fi...