A nearly unmitigated disaster

Rating: 4/10 (19 June 2007)

I think this film has a very vocal and loyal following that explains the overwhelmingly positive nature of the IMDb comments, but speaking as a huge fan of both the King novel and Kubrick the director, this film is a butcher job. The countless changes, both trivial and consequential, that Kubrick and Johnson made to King's story were timid, superficial attempts to add "zing" to a story that needs nothing if handled by a subtle, canny genre movie-maker.
Consider the change from roque mallet to axe as Jack's weapon of choice. Ostensibly the axe might be more viscerally frightening with a higher damage-per-swing ratio, but the mallet offers a much slower, more measured punishment, a more appropriate dosing out of Jack's "medicine". Or the pivotal scene in which first Danny and then Jack confront the long-dead menace in Rm. 217 (237 in the movie). This is the key scene in the novel, when the hotel's power crosses the threshold from merely unnerving to physically threatening, and Jack's psychological separation from his wife and son becomes complete. However with Kubrick's calculated disconnection of any and all overtly supernatural elements in the story, the vignette merely becomes another ambiguous manifestation of the shared psychosis between Jack and Danny. Or does it? Kubrick spends the entire movie seemingly wanting to have his cake and eat it too, almost entirely eliminating the power of the hotel's supernatural consciousness, but never quite crossing the line that would have made the story entirely about Jack's mental breakdown. This might have been a more credible and coherent story, but instead we are left with scenes such as Wendy's witness to the ghostly sexual encounter or the elevator full of blood, scenes that make no sense unless there is something happening in the hotel outside of the three living people inside it.
Of course the story is not the only problem with the film. The acting is uniformly awful, with the woodenness of Duvall and Lloyd in no way compensated for by Jack Nicholson's wildly over-the-top (and utterly wrong-headed) characterization of Jack Torrance. I suspect Nicholson sensed early on the awkward, lethargic dynamic he was going to get from his co-stars and director and believed that flaming out was going to be the best thing for the picture, and to his credit, his performance is the most interesting thing about a mostly dull experience, but give me Steven Weber's Jack 24/7/365, thank you very much. There are any examples of Kubrick's legendary inability to elicit warm, involving performances from even the most accomplished acting talent, but this is one of the few examples where such performances were absolutely needed to tell the story correctly.
Kubrick did not comprehend what made the King novel a subtle masterpiece. He only understood that it was a hot commodity at the time, and in his zeal to add a horror movie to his oeuvre, he grabbed for it.