Worst. Stephen King. Adaptation. Ever.
There are great Stephen King adaptations and there are terrible Stephen King adaptations, then there’s The Langoliers, a TV adaptation that actively insults its source material, comprehensively squandering what might just be King’s most overtly cinematic work ever. One of the four novellas in Four Past Midnight, (and one of two that have so far been adapted) it sees King venture into sci-fi again, but this time without quite letting go of the horror. Directed by Tom Holland, no not that one, it languishes deservedly at the bottom of most rankings of King’s movies and TV shows.
A handful of passengers – mystery writer Bob Jenkins (Dean Stockwell), businessman Craig Toomey (Bronson Pinchot), blind psychic (it is a Stephen King story, after all) Dinah Bellman (Kate Maberly) among them – on the red-eye flight from Los Angeles to Boston wake to find most of their fellow passengers, and the flight crew gone. No turbulence, no warning, just rows of empty seats and scattered personal effects. Luckily one of the remaining passengers is deadheading airline Captain Brian Engle (David Morse) which solves the most immediate crisis. But when he lands the plane at Bangor International Airport (again, it is a Stephen King story), the mystery only deepens when they find the tarmac and terminal similarly deserted and the world eerily silent.
The Tom Holland who wrote and directed The Langoliers might not be the MCU’s Spider-Man but he is the same Tom Holland who played a large part in shaping eighties horror with iconic genre greats like Fright Night and Child’s Play. That lineage makes what unfolds here all the more baffling. Gone is the verve, the tonal balance, the instinct for knowing when to lean into camp and when to play it straight. Instead, the perfunctory direction and clumsy script drain everything into a kind of theatrical u-bend: airless, uncertain, and devoid of urgency. Claustrophobic airplane sets give way to cheap provincial airport terminals around which Holland shepherds his cast through an incoherent series of talky scenes where they hurl huge chunks of exposition at each other with wild tonal dissonance that undermines whatever suspense the story is trying to create. Holland seems to believe he’s directing a vintage episode of The Twilight Zone but what reaches the screen is more like Airplane! without the jokes.
Dean Stockwell, usually capable of infusing even the dullest crap with a puckish sense of gravitas, is visibly defeated by the dialogue by the end of the first part, delivering the rest of his monologues like he’s narrating an in-flight safety video with a hangover, and wishing he still had Ziggy with him to exit through the imaging chamber. David Morse likewise seems resigned to his fate but at least fate would be kinder to him, offering him a couple of Stephen King do-overs with The Green Mile and Hearts In Atlantis lying ahead of him. Bronson Pinchot, meanwhile, seizes on the lack of tonal cohesion to use the character of Craig Toomy to explore what it would be like if Serge from Beverly Hills Cop had a cocaine-fuelled psychotic break during an off-Broadway production of American Psycho.
The novel’s dazzling metaphysical sci-fi conceit is buried beneath a slurry of cheap production values, leaden camerawork and lacklustre, confused performances, losing any thematic subtlety and slumping into soapy melodrama. The Langoliers themselves, when they finally arrive, offer no answers and add insult to the injury that’s preceded them for three hours. Rendered in CGI so crude it might’ve been rendered via a dial-up modem, they resemble digital meatballs with teeth, or perhaps the mutated offspring of an unwise union between Pac-Man and a Chain Chomp from Super Mario. They float through the frame like corrupted clip art with the menace of a loading screen crash. The world isn’t devoured by cosmic horror, its nibbled away by indifference. If anything epitomises the scale of The Langoliers‘ failure it’s that the one element of the story that absolutely should chew up the scenery…doesn’t.
The Langoliers makes me angry. It’s poor not by today’s standards but by the standards of its time. When I first read the story in Four Past Midnight I was immediately struck by what an amazing movie it would make. Boy did Tom Holland prove me wrong.
