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Summary A life-affirming, genre-bending story based on Stephen King's novella about three chapters in the life of an ordinary man named Charles Krantz.
Directed By: Mike Flanagan
Written By: Mike Flanagan, Stephen King
The Life of Chuck
66
7.8
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Summary A life-affirming, genre-bending story based on Stephen King's novella about three chapters in the life of an ordinary man named Charles Krantz.
Directed By: Mike Flanagan
Written By: Mike Flanagan, Stephen King
Where to Watch
Not available in your country?
ExpressVPN
Get 3 Extra months free
$6.67/mth
Top Cast
Metascore
Generally Favorable
Based on 28 Critic Reviews
66
57% Positive
16 Reviews
16 Reviews
36% Mixed
10 Reviews
10 Reviews
7% Negative
2 Reviews
2 Reviews
Metascore
Generally Favorable
Based on 28 Critic Reviews
66
57% Positive
16 Reviews
16 Reviews
36% Mixed
10 Reviews
10 Reviews
7% Negative
2 Reviews
2 Reviews
If you want to go for the really scary stuff, there are plenty of other King movies for that. “Chuck” instead is something truly special, a moving fantasy of a life well lived and no dance step left untaken.
Dancing between the ruminative and the revelatory, it never succumbs to being maudlin or cloying. The Life of Chuck is a modern fable told with the deftness of a fairy tale, with the sheer exuberance of a musical while exuding the same sense of wonder one gets staring up at the heavens.
User Score
Generally Favorable
Based on 6 User Ratings
7.8
67% Positive
4 Ratings
4 Ratings
33% Mixed
2 Ratings
2 Ratings
0% Negative
0 Ratings
0 Ratings
User Score
Generally Favorable
Based on 6 User Ratings
7.8
67% Positive
4 Ratings
4 Ratings
33% Mixed
2 Ratings
2 Ratings
0% Negative
0 Ratings
0 Ratings
It’s pretty rare to have a movie that really demands of you and makes you think. this movie weaves a tapestry that hilights the beauty and fragility of life in an original three act way. The more you know about it ahead of time the less impactful it will be. Don’t ask questions and see this movie!
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"The Life of Chuck" is the kind of masterful film that sneaks up on you. It may not bowl you over in its first few minutes. It may even confuse or frustrate you at times. But by the end, if you’ve let it in, it definitely leaves an indelible mark.
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The Life of Chuck takes a moment for its storytelling technique to be fully understood. But the plot offers intrigue, drama, and mystery in one compelling package.
By Rick Hong
FULL REVIEW
As a filmmaker, Flanagan deals in raw, go-for-broke emotion; it’s just that this time around, he’s using that passion to affirm the audience, not disturb them.
Lacking in tonal connective tissue, The Life of Chuck may still leave in its wake the desired upbeat, life-hugging effect, but it ultimately proves to be an ephemeral one — as transitory as the apparitions who usually haunt Flanagan’s more potent ghost stories.
All technical prowess, from Flanagan to his strong ensemble cast, can only go so far when it’s in service of such shallow, offensive escapism. This is a childish take on a universal experience and everyone, from the people involved in the production to the viewers, deserve better.
In The Life of Chuck, the pieces come together much too obviously. And the takeaways — that a person is the product of experience, and don’t judge a book by its cover — are well-tread to the point of total flatness.
Flanagan has deftly extracted a charming ’90s-style big-feelings movie from septuagenarian Stephen King’s increasingly clumsy hands. Even King’s tendency to make every decade before 2000 feel like the early ’60s works better than it has any right to.
Report
It’s incredibly frustrating to watch a film that has so much potential but ultimately fails to capitalize on it. Such is the case with one of the most heavily anticipated offerings of the summer movie season, “The Life of Chuck, from writer-director Mike Flanagan, based on the short story of the same name from author Steven King. Told in three acts in reverse chronological order, the picture follows the life of Charles “Chuck” Krantz (Tom Hiddleston) and how his adult self emerged from a childhood of mixed experiences under the care of his paternal grandparents (Mark Hamill, Mia Sara). It focuses on how an inquisitive preteen (Jacob Tremblay) with a love of and gift for dance ultimately (and largely inexplicably) settled for a mediocre life as an accountant instead, one whose existence was sadly cut short in his prime and subsequently provided the basis for soul-searching and introspective reflection among characters and audience members alike. In telling this story, the film seeks to address a variety of grand philosophical and cosmological questions, many of which are tied to regrets about the compromises we make during our lifetimes. While the film certainly has its share of genuine flashes of brilliance in this regard, there aren’t nearly enough of them, and those that manage to surface are frequently underdeveloped, soft peddled, applied inconsistently (even in contradictory fashion) or significantly watered down. It’s almost as if the filmmaker lacked sufficient confidence in his own message, yielding a superficial, uneven, sometimes treacly treatment of its foundational principles. The fault here primarily lies with a script that should have gone through one or more additional rounds of revisions to refine what it was attempting to achieve – its quest to make the truly profound statement it was striving for instead of settling for something far less sublime and eminently unsatisfying. Moreover, the screenplay’s shortcomings carry over into other aspects of the production, particularly the unnecessary inclusion of extraneous material while simultaneously undercooking other more relevant elements. And this, in turn, affects such other aspects as the film’s underwhelming editing and sometimes-unimpressive performances (most notably Hiddleston, who ends up primarily playing a glorified walk-on). To its credit, there are some noteworthy attributes, such as the positively mesmerizing opening sequence (as presented here, “Act Three”), the picture’s delightful sense of whimsy, clever (if occasionally overdone) homages to other pictures (especially “Back to the Future” (1985) and “The Truman Show” (1998)), an excellent original score and commendable complementary soundtrack (despite its mind-boggling exclusion of what would have been a perfectly suited addition, one that Tom Petty fans will readily recognize), and a fine supporting performance by Chiwetel Ejiofor. But, these assets aside, they’re not enough to make up for the picture’s shortfalls. To that end, then, moviegoers looking for better screening choices that address material like what was intended here would be wise to view Tim Burton’s far superior “Big Fish” (2003) instead. Indeed, had it been handled more adeptly, “The Life of Chuck” could have been one of the best-ever adaptations of one of King’s works and one of the best overall releases of recent years, a picture with much to offer audiences on so many fronts. Unfortunately, we’ll never get to see that film and the valuable wisdom it could have imparted for how we live our lives and how we can get the most out of them while we have the chance.
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