Miserable adaptation of a great book

Rating: Null/10 (23 April 2002)

This film is one of the worst screen adaptations of a novel I have ever seen. Kubrick seems to make the wrong decision at every turn, and the result is a terribly long and incoherent film that does a terrible injustice to Stephen King's terrific original story.
First of all, the story is about a man going SLOWLY insane; Nicholson seems more than halfway there at the start of the movie, robbing his character of any suspense.
In general, Kubrick has (as usual) ignored his actors shamelessly, with the result that none of them gives anything close to the right performance.
Another bad mistake: in the book, the relationship between the father and the son is an unusually close and loving one; this makes the resulting horror all the more tragic. In the film, the father and son seem to have no relationship at all. The mother, a strong and purposeful character in the book, is here something of a ninny.
Worst of all, perhaps, is that in the book the boy is the focus of the story; the movie shifts the focus to the father and therefore cuts the guts out of what was a pretty complex story.
Also, like most of Kubrick's movies, this one is simply WAY TOO LONG. There is absolutely no reason for this film to take so much time to say, in the end, so little.