Most overrated movie of the past 30 years

Rating: 5/10 (15 January 2007)

What's the big attraction of this film? Have the folks who rate this movie so highly ever even READ the Stephen King novel upon which it's supposedly based? Kubrick made so many crucial changes that you can't claim this movie was a true adaptation. I'm not saying it was a bad movie, or that it didn't have some good moments, but as an adaptation of one of the great horror novels it was most disappointing. Kubrick deserved every "brickbat" that King has thrown his way, and more -- one can only imagine the horror King must have felt upon seeing his book so thoroughly mangled. Yes, Kubrick was good on such efforts as "2001" "Dr Strangelove" and "Paths of Glory", but he simply had no feel for a movie about the supernatural. We'll never know just what kind of classic a director like Robert "The Haunting" Wise would have done with this material.
How does this movie fail? Let us count the ways: 1) Kubrick seemed to go out of his way to shoot "against type" for a scary movie. There's no feel of a 100 year old hotel; his Overlook is as pedestian as a Holiday Inn in Phoenix. He harshly over-lights many scenes, which dissipates the scariness, and is down-right ANNOYING. An old hotel up in the mountains during winter SHOULD be dark and foreboding! 2) Shelley Duvall is totally miscast. She was fine for cartoon-come-to-life Olive Oil, but is clearly out of her depth in this one; she can't register any emotion convincingly, and seems to be reading her lines off cue cards. Some of her acting is so bad it's laughable, such as the scene where Jack menacingly backs her across the lobby to the stairwell; Nicholson's good acting only serves to make her performance all the more embarrassing and excruciating. You're practically rooting for Jack to grab that bat and beat her brains in. Add to her miserable performance a frumpy, clown-like wardrobe & stringy hair that hangs in her face, and you get a pathetic caricature of King's Wendy. 3) Bad casting of Stuart Ullman and Dick Halloran. In the novel, Ullman was a bastard and there was a mutual dislike between him and Jack. In the movie, he's played by Barry Nelson, and comes off as affable as Ozzie Nelson! Why Kubrick cut this tension out of the script is a mystery. And Scatman Crothers as Halloran? Just didn't work. Reading the book I got a mental image of Ossie Davis or James Earl Jones, both accomplished actors who could've brought some meat to this part. Scatman's Halloran is so inconsequential that we hardly miss him when Kubrick decides to add alittle gore and has him axed to death (another unfortunate departure from the book). 4) Unknown Danny Lloyd as Danny was a very poor casting decision. Not only couldn't this kid act, but he brought none of the crucial sympathy to what was undoubtedly the book's central character. King's Danny was such a likable, charming little boy that King actually changed the ending of the book from what he'd originally intended -- to have Jack kill Danny. But the screen Danny is so colorless that he becomes a zombie, and like Wendy, you don't care if he lives or dies. Instead of true para-psychological abilities, you feel he's simply a weirdo who likes to growl while moving his fingers. (Again, another unfortunate departure from the book...couldn't Kubrick of had "Tony" manifest himself in visions, as King had? Can you blame them for not taking this silly hand-puppet act seriously?). 5) Kubrick downplays the supernatural aspect of the Overlook, instead concentrating on Jack's decent into madness. This change of focus, more than anything, show's Kubrick's lack of feel for a supernatural thriller. Instead of being a weak and flawed man who becomes the helpless pawn of the evil hotel, Jack's behavior could be ascribed to destructive psychological tendencies which are accentuated by "cabin fever". 6) Too many plot changes from the book to mention, but the substitution of an inert hedge-maze for moving (and menacing) topiary animals is a big one. True, the level of special effects in 1980 would have posed a problem, but I believe an imaginative director and crew could have pulled it off. Changing the climax from the Jack-Danny confrontation up on the 3rd floor to the characters running around the maze -- and most incredibly, Jack never actually CATCHES UP with Danny -- was a cheat, pure and simple. It robbed the movie of the necessary emotional climax, as well as the profound point to which everything in the book was moving towards. Since Kubrick rewrote the ending so heavily, including omitting the attack on Wendy, he could think of nothing better for her to do at this time then to have her wander about the Overlook, stumbling upon one silly spook-show after another. This device was certainly pointless and a cheap trick.
The only reason I give "The Shining" even a "5" rating is for the admittedly bravura performance of Jack Nicholson. While his performance during the first half of the movie is stilted, he does make up for it during the second half. In fact, without his contribution, this movie would have been a long-forgotten flop. Stephen King's miniseries "The Shining", while not without it's problems, did fix a lot of what Kubrick botched. The miniseries certainly deserves the praise that's been mistakenly lavished on Kubrick's version.