‘Life of Chuck’ review: TIFF People’s Choice winner is tedious sap
nypost.comRunning time: 110 minutes. Not yet rated.“Life is very long,” wrote T. S. Eliot.So is “The Life of Chuck,” horror maestro Mike Flanagan’s sap-fest that premiered last week at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Based on Stephen King’s not-at-all-scary short story, the one-note tale unfolds backward in three soupy parts, and is narrated by Nick Offerman like a lumberjack Dr.
Seuss.The first, featuring Chiwetel Ejiofor as a schoolteacher named Marty who is contending with the oncoming apocalypse, is so conspicuously bad you figure there must be a method to its messiness.
And there is, but the twist that explains away this confounding world only ups the film’s quality from awful to fine. At the start, there is a religion-meets-sci-fi vibe not unlike “The Leftovers,” only lesser, and a natural-disaster doom à la “The Day After Tomorrow.” The East and West Coasts have been subsumed by the oceans, the Midwest is on fire and the internet is down.
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