When Stephen King published “The Life of Chuck,” one of the four stories in his 2020 novella collection If It Bleeds, we were already a month into the pandemic. We didn’t know how batshit things would get at the time, but King — being the prolific, prophetic purveyor of horrifying, fucked-up literature that he is — gave us an idea of what would come, and what we needed to do in order to get through it.
A three-part yarn about people who are lost, trapped and ultimately looking for some sort of human connection as their world crumbles around them, and death keeps taking their loved ones, “Chuck” was basically King giving readers some much-needed, short-but-sweet compassion and humanity during the hellish last year of you-know-who’s first term as president. Now that the Buffalo-sauce-colored summabitch has returned to the White House again (and has wasted no time making America dysfunctional again), here comes the movie adaptation, looking to soothe scared and lonely audiences once again.
Chuck is about the end of the world — or so we think. Going in reverse-chronological order, the movie begins with the world sliding into an apocalypse. A massive earthquake in California sends most of the state into the ocean. Whole species of birds and fish are dying out. Gridlocked streets are full of cars abandoned by their owners. And the worst part — the internet is down. (Oddball character actor David Dastmalchian appears in one scene just to lament the loss of his beloved Pornhub.) Although chaos and destruction are going on at home and abroad, the things most bothering local schoolteacher Marty (Chiwetel Ejiofor) are the ads and billboards featuring an accountant named Charles Krantz (Tom Hiddleston) being congratulated for “39 great years.” The ads also baffle Marty’s estranged wife Felicia (Karen Gillan), who begins to realize she may want to be with her husband if the world does, in fact, end.
We get to know more about Krantz in the second story, which could also double as Hiddleston’s audition reel for future movie musicals. (Dude really wants you to know he can do more than play Loki.) The mild-mannered Krantz suddenly gets a case of happy feet one sunny day, attracting a promenade crowd by doing some improvised dance moves with another passerby (Annalise Basso) while a busking drummer (Taylor Gordon, also known as The Pocket Queen) provides the backbeat.
The final story takes you back to Chuck’s grief-filled formative years, as the young Charles (Jacob Tremblay, looking like a baby Rick Moranis) lives with his grandparents (Mark Hamill — yes, Master Luke is in this — and Ferris Bueller’s main squeeze Mia Sara). Through a dance class, Chuck discovers that he’s pretty good on his feet. It’s the most joy he gets on a regular basis; most of the time, he’s trying to figure out what Grandpa is hiding in the upstairs cupola.
Chuck is the latest King adaptation from workhorse horror meister Mike Flanagan, who also adapted Gerald’s Game for Netflix in 2017 and the Shining sequel Doctor Sleep in 2019. Foolishly marketed as a science-fiction drama (the first story does have lengthy scenes of characters rambling on about time and the stars and other things Carl Sagan used to talk about on Cosmos), it’s really a connected anthology featuring a dystopian thriller, a musical and a quirky but suspenseful coming-of-age drama. This makes Chuck the least terrifying King adaptation Flanagan has done so far, but Flanagan also makes it the most literary. The film also features Nick Offerman as an off-camera narrator, practically mimicking King’s folksy storytelling style.
But as much as Chuck reminds audiences that getting off the web and being there for your fellow man/woman/nonbinary human is the only way to survive anything — from the end of the world to multiple deaths in the family — it’s quite the dry, sappy slog. With all the twists, time-bouncing and tear-jerking, I thought for sure that sentimental showrunner Dan Fogelman of This Is Us was behind all this.
With both the thriller and the drama being dreary, monotonous trips to misery land, the musical section serves almost as a jumping-and-jiving respite from the sorrow and soul-searching that will pick up once adult Chuck takes off his dancing shoes. At one point in the last story, Hamill gives a long, dream-dashing monologue to little Chuck about how math will get him further in life than dancing. No wonder dude freaks out and briefly gets his Bob Fosse on later in life. For me, the most depressing thing about this movie is seeing ’80s stars Sara and A Nightmare on Elm Street final girl Heather Langenkamp (as a family friend connected to an oxygen tank) play gray-haired golden girls. Whether it’s telling the convoluted story of one man’s life or casting actors from my youth in elderly roles, The Life of Chuck can’t stop letting us know that time will always and forever be, for lack of a better word, a muhfucka.
