The Simpsons' parody was more entertaining.

Rating: Null/10 (1 March 2002)

* 1/2 out of ****
**SPOILERS** Just by reading my headline summary of The Shining, I'm guessing there are going to be a lot of fans thinking "Oh, it's just another average Joe out there who just doesn't 'understand' Kubrick and his films." Okay, I suppose I could take a pretentious insult like that. But what I do understand is that from the opening scenes, this movie reeks of filmmaking incompetence. You can clearly see, during the aerial view of the car heading towards the Overlook Hotel, the helicopter's shadow on the bottom right-hand side of your screen. Even worse than that has to be the clear view of the helicopter blades on the top of the screen during the first shot of the hotel itself. I seriously doubt Kubrick and company filmed this intentionally.
But, seriously, The Shining is easily one of the most overrated movies of its genre. I'm a huge fan of horror, moreso than the average viewer, but I can't see how so many people could back a movie that's obviously second-rate on so many levels. As anybody who's seen the movie knows, it's based off of Stephen King's popular novel (To be honest, it was never really one of my favorites of his, though still a decent book). Jack Torrance (Played by a hilariously overwrought Jack Nicholson) is a struggling writer who takes up the job as caretaker of the luxurious Overlook Hotel for the winter, along with his wife (Shelley Duvall) and young son, Danny. Unfortunate for them, a blizzard holes them in and Nicholson starts to grow insane.
Not much of a plot, is there? Truthfully, I'm not one of those people out there who believes in strict adherence to the source material. If a movie can diverge from the book it's based on and still come through as grade-A quality, it's got my respect. But Kubrick doesn't just diverge, he leaves out major parts of the plot completely. No back story is offered about the hotel and why it's haunted, there's not even a slight hint given as to who Tony is, the imaginary boy that Danny speaks to. There's a big difference between trying to scare the audience with the unknown and just totally alienating the viewer by not explaining a thing, and this movie accomplishes the latter. And I do believe that this movie is called The Shining, which is the name Scatman Crother's character gives for a certain telepathic power that Danny has. So how come this power is of very little consequence to the plot? The only time it's really intentionally used is just to get someone over to the hotel, and if you've seen the movie, you'll know how pointless that was.
I can just hear the fans clamoring that the success of this movie has little to do with King's original plot, but Kubrick's direction. To that, I can only laugh. Oh, it's not like he doesn't try to give the movie a foreboding atmosphere or a stylish look, it's just that he kind of fails in these regards. The ominous aerial shots, a little cool at first, grow a bit hilarious after the fifth time it's done, especially with the banging music playing over the background, as if to remind us "Brace yourself for the horror to come!"
Kubrick also relies heavily on long tracking shots, a la Brian De Palma. Initially, it works in creating the sense that this hotel is indeed humongous, but I pretty much got the point after the first hour. Kubrick continues these shots incessantly throughout the ENTIRE film (148 minutes!), with almost no end in sight. Even De Palma would have known when enough is enough.
When it comes to this movie's running time, two-and-a-half hours doesn't seem all that long compared to some other King films (The Stand, Storm of the Century, and The Shining remake). But Kubrick paces this film at the speed of molasses, making sure that everybody says their dialogue as slowly as possible, making sure that his camera catches as much of the hotel as slowly as possible, making sure...you probably know what I'm trying to get at. There's a difference between deliberate pacing (2001, Kubrick's real masterpiece) and simply being boring and talky, and The Shining is most definitely the latter.
And it's not as if though I can't appreciate a slow build-up, but as I said before, this build-up isn't particularly well-done and every time a certain segment gets interesting, Kubrick cuts away and kills off the momentum by introducing each new part with silly subheadings like "The Interview," "A Month Later," and "Tuesday." It's funny that I hear complaints about the subheadings for Sphere ALL the time, but never once for this film. I don't know about you, but a subheading like "The Interview" hardly sounds foreboding or preparation for the horror ahead, and I very much doubt Kubrick intention was to throw us off guard from the "horror" with such a workmanlike heading.
Kubrick's ideas of pay-off for a slow build-up aren't very inspiring. We get a naked woman in a bathtub who then becomes a naked, old woman standing out of that bathtub. She cackles like a witch at Nicholson, and then Nicholson proceeds to...back off slowly. This isn't a particularly ambitious ghost, since it seems entirely content with just cackling. Still, this is the only real scene I can think of in which Kubrick actually utilizes the whole "haunted house" motif which, by the way, is considerably more interesting than seeing Nicholson go insane.
When that does eventually occur, Kubrick decides to film virtually all the chases OUTSIDE the hotel. I mean, this hotel is like a huge mansion, a perfect opportunity for cat-and-mouse chases, and like much of the film, the potential is once again wasted. The chase outiside in the hedges isn't bad, but the outcome was never in doubt.
Now that I've bashed Kubrick's filmmaking, it's on to the performances. WIth three principal actors for the majority of the running time, it's important the acting is very good. Too bad it's not. Jack Nicholson's overacting is so ridiculous, it would put Charlton Heston to shame. Hell, there's not even an attempt to make us sympathize with Torrance's plight. Shelley Duvall registers pretty badly as his wife, not quite as awful as I've heard, but she's pretty damn annoying. The kid who plays Danny never seems like anything more than a child actor trying to act disturbed (For better peformances with similar themes in mind, watch the far superior The Sixth Sense and Stir of Echoes). Scatman Crothers is easily the best of the cast, but (spoiler) he's only here to give the film a body count. It's almost as if though Kubrick thought he would lose the audience's attention if he didn't try putting in a visceral kill scene, and it's hard not to lose respect for him for doing that.
The Shining, bad as it often is, still has its moments (Since it's directed by Kubrick, how could it not?). The scene where Shelley Duvall flips through hundreds of papers stating the same phrase is a real spine-tingler, the only scene that's remotely frightening. When it's hinted that something evil lurks inside room 237, it makes for a fairly creepy scene when the kid stands right outside that room's door (Of course, when you find out what's inside, it's hard not to be a little disappointed). But considering that a big deal is made out of this room, it's more than a little annoying that no explanation is given for what happened inside. The score, overdone as it may sometimes be, is still pretty decent and probably scarier than almost anything else this film has to offer
So, I suppose that's all I've got to say about Kubrick's rendition of The Shining, a movie which could have been so much more but ended up going nowhere. There was, of course, a remake, most of which I've seen, and yes, I liked it considerably more (Though it has been five years since I've seen that version). For a film that combines the talents of Stanley Kubrick, Stephen King, and Jack Nicholson it's hard not to be disappointed with the outcome (I will make explicitly clear that none of this is really King's fault, considering he wasn't all that pleased with Kubrick's film itself and that he had nothing to do with the making of the movie).