Mr. Harrigan’s Phone follows The Black Phone in the apparently burgeoning genre of scary telephones, a niche that has been quickly monopolized by the Kings of Maine.
The Black Phone is based on a 2005 Joe Hill short story, while Mr. Harrigan’s Phone has been adapted from a 2020 King novella. This means that the latter not only ripped off his own son but himself as well, seeing as how Mr. Harrigan’s Phone is pretty much a rehash of Apt Pupil, only a lot fucking dumber.
Make no mistake; this thing smacks of latter-day Stevie King. On the other hand, though I haven’t read the original text, I have read enough from the Master of Horror to get an inkling that a little, or more likely a lot, has been lost in the translation from paper to screen.
King can be the wickedest of writers, but he’s never mean; he loves both his characters and his readers dearly — perhaps even a little too much; I think it’s safe to say that King often panders to his audience (or, to be more exact, he panders to himself and, by extension, to his readership), but he seldom, if ever, condescends to them.
What we have here, however, is a movie that both disdains and patronizes its viewers, no doubt assuming them to be as obtuse as its characters. If this film were a person, it’d be the kind of person who likes to brag about their library filled with obvious examples of the Western Canon, so that people will know just how many fancy books they have read.
Being a movie, though, it’s the kind of movie that has a character reading a book out loud whilst simultaneously showing a caption with the book’s title, just in case we can’t identify a random paragraph from Lady Chatterley’s Lover (but other than the ‘Book People’ from Fahrenheit 451, who could?).
Why did the filmmakers do this? Was it so they could feel a lot smarter than they really are? Or to make us feel a lot dumber than we really are? Were they afraid that when we hear the words “The Horror! The Horror!” we’re going to think about Marlon Brandon as opposed to Joseph Conrad?
And worst of all is that so vapid and cynical is the film that the young protagonist reads three times a week for five years to an old rich white guy (the always effective Donald Sutherland), but the two only start really bonding over a fucking iPhone.
The old man is at first reluctant to accept the young man’s gift of a smartphone (quoting Thoreau in the process, so the filmmakers do know how to work in a literary reference; they just prefer to name-drop most of the time), but is quickly sucked into the World Wide Spider’s Web.
He ain’t too happy about it, though, leading to a scene in which, according to the hero’s tiresome narration, the old man “predicts fake news” and “Julian Assange” and some such other bullshit.
Now, the sentiments expressed by the character, and especially as expressed by the actor, are technically sound, but they are hardly novel — and setting the story back in the late 2000s-early 2010s does nothing to lend them any urgency.
Moreover, the film completely forgets about this until the very end, when the hero reaches the trite conclusion that spending all your time glued to your phone may not be a good idea after all.
Let me get this straight. The protagonist is responsible for two deaths (indirectly the first, directly the second), but his only comeuppance is presumably swearing off mobile devices (a decision that may or may not take, considering that he’s advised early that “if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off, and cast it from thee,” which in this movie is interpreted as ‘go buy a newer iPhone’) — but it’s okay, because it wasn’t really his fault; a combination of cutting-edge technology and old fashioned necromancy made him do it.
See the problem? The filmmakers are trying to make a point using both allegory and literalism, two conceits that when applied concurrently seldom achieve anything other than cancelling each other out, and their being mixed together betrays desperation at the script level; it’s a variation of the show and tell (instead of one or the other, preferably the former) technique that resulted in plastering the screen with the names of books at the same time as they are being read aloud (a gimmick that is also dropped almost as soon as it is introduced).
So much time is devoted to throwaway aspects of the plot, that the screenplay barely has a chance to show what would be a healthy curiosity regarding its central mystery.
Consider this: a dead man can somehow return from beyond the grave to carry out dirty jobs for a whiny little brat, but the same ghost or whatever the fuck it is can’t be bothered to spellcheck his otherworldly text messages, so that “stop” becomes “sst.” That’s why I prefer to use a Ouija board for all my living-to-dead communications.
90% of Everything is Crap 