Producers: Trevor Macy and Mike Flanagan   Director: Mike Flanagan Screenplay: Mike Flanagan   Cast: Tom Hiddleston, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Annalise Basso, Benjamin Pajak, Karen Gillan, Mia Sara, Matthew Lillard, Carl Lumbly, The Pocket Queen (Taylor Gordon), Samantha Sloyan, Jacob Tremblay, Kate Siegel, Cody Flanagan, Rahul Kohli, Q’orianka Kilcher, Antonio Raul Corbo,  Nick Offerman and Mark Hamill   Distributor: Neon

Grade: C

In 1987 R.E.M. sang “It’s the End of the World as We Know It.”  In 2020 Stephen King’s novella “The Life of Chuck,” one of three pieces in the collection “If It Bleeds,” depicted what could be called “It’s the End of the World as He Knows It,” or more simply “The End of Chuck’s World,” though King structured the story in reverse order as a puzzle the reader would have to work out. 

Writer-director Mike Flanagan, whose devotion to King is well known, embraces that structure in his adaptation of the tale.  Indeed, his drive for fidelity has led him to have the film narrated from beginning to end by Nick Offerman in words that might diverge somewhat from King’s but are so close that it’s practically like listening to an audiobook.  It’s a clumsy device, but one can understand Flanagan’s decision to use it, because without it most viewers would be unlikely to understand what they’re seeing, and be frustrated by it.

In the first third of the picture, which is chronologically last in the action, the residents of a town are experiencing, along with the rest of the world, a series of natural disasters—floods, tornadoes and much more.  California, in fact, is collapsing into the Pacific.  Amid these devastating events Marty Anderson (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a public school teacher, is struggling to convince parents to keep their children in class.  And his ex-wife Felicia (Karen Gillian), a nurse, is trying to keep the hospital operating along with her colleague (Rahul Kohli).

Marty and Felicia are still friends, and keep in touch by phone.  But they don’t get together in person until the end of the chapter, after each is forced to come to terms with the approaching catastrophe as best they can.  For Felicia, it’s foreshadowed when all the heart monitors flatline even though they’re not connected to any patients.  For Marty it’s made evident when his drive home is stopped by a huge sinkhole.  Conversations with neighbor Gus Wilfong (Matthew Lillard) and Sam Yarbrough (Carl Lumbly), an elderly mortician he meets when walking to Felicia’s house, lead him to ideas about how the how physics, mathematics and philosophy relate to what’s happening.

Finally he and Felicia share their thoughts—including wonderment about an omnipresent ad thanking a bland figure named Chuck (Tom Hiddleston) for “39 Great Years!”—before the night sky begins to dim, planet by planet.

The second chapter introduces Chuck Krantz, the mysterious billboard man.  He’s an accountant attending a convention, who’s moved by the drumming of street busker Taylor Franck (The Pocket Queen) not only to begin an impromptu dance but to entice passerby Janice Halliday (Annalise Basso), who’s distraught over being dumped by her boyfriend, to join him in a routine that attracts an enthusiastic reaction from the crowd.  The narrator tells us something about Chuck that’s related to his odd appearance in the previous segment.

Then the third, concluding chapter moves backward to Chuck’s earlier life, when, as a child (Cody Flanagan), he was orphaned and taken in by his grandparents Sarah (Mia Sara) and Albie (Mark Hamill).  Sarah, a homemaker, introduced him to dance, and as an adolescent (Benjamin Pajak) he took it up enthusiastically with encouragement from one of his teachers (Samantha Sloyan), at whose prodding at a school function he took to the floor with a classmate in a pas de deux that earned wild cheers from onlookers, including none other than Marty Anderson. 

But Albie, an accountant, impresses on Chuck the importance of a real profession, and the beauty of numbers.  He also has one absolute prohibition for the boy: never enter the locked cupola atop their house.  The reason is eventually revealed when Chuck (Jacob Tremblay) disobeys the order after the death of Sarah has left Albie an alcoholic wreck; the secret of the room provides a supernatural element to the story.  Chuck later arranges the funeral of his grandfather with Mr. Yarbrough. 

The reappearance of characters from the “first” chapter is a clue to what the entire film is about, but it’s another episode from the last one, in which young Chuck is introduced to Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” by another of his teachers (Kate Siegel), that provides the key by positing the notion of the relation between microcosm and macrocosm.  Scenes in which Chuck appears with his wife (Q’orianka Kilcher) and son (Antonio Raul Corbo) make the correlation crystal clear; everything we see is a construct in one man’s mind, a summing-up collage of memory, imagination, joy and regret.

Some will consider what King has done in “The Life of Chuck” deep and touching; others will find it simpleminded and sappy.  What’s less debatable is that Flanagan’s adaptation is an example of fidelity to a source taken to such an extreme that the result feels contrived and ponderous.  Even the dance sequences, which should be exhilarating, are studied, despite the panache with which Hiddleston and (especially) Pajak perform them.  And while some of the performances—Sara’s and Ejiofor’s, for instance—are individually moving, others—Hamill’s, particularly—feel like mere stunts.

The film is certainly well-made, if you don’t mind the sound-stage theatricality in the work of production designer Steve Arnold and cinematographer Eben Bolter and the stagey crisp-as-toast look of Terry Anderson’s costumes.  Flanagan’s lapidary editing, which—again apart from the dances—treats almost every line as a golden nugget to be surrounded with pregnant pauses, accentuates the pretension of it all.

There’s no gainsaying the ambition at work here to say something heartfelt about the human condition and the individual’s relation to the world.  And some viewers will undoubtedly be as moved by it as they are by films like “It’s a Wonderful Life.”   But to many Flanagan’s film, like Robert Zemeckis’ recent “Here,” will come off as a carefully crafted but inertly earnest exercise in pseudo-profundity.

Producers: Leonora Darby, James Harris and Mark Lane   Director: John Maclean   Screenplay: John Maclean   Cast: Kōki (Mitsuki Kimura), Tim Roth, Jack Lowden, Takehiro Hira, Rory McCann, Raphaël Thiéry, Alex Macqueen, Jack Morris, Dennis Okwera, Jamie Michie, Bryan Mills, Ian Hanmore, Douglas Russell, Sammy Heyman, Joanne Whalley and Nathan Malone   Distributor: IFC Films

Grade: C

Scottish writer-director John Maclean, whose first feature was the aptly titled “Slow West” (2015), a beautifully filmed but languid tale of death on the American prairie in the late nineteenth century, again joins forces with cinematographer Robbie Ryan to craft a visually evocative period piece, another study of a violent society this time set in the rural Britain of 1790.  Like the previous film “Tornado” is a deliberately paced story punctuated by bursts of brutal action, gorgeous to look at but dramatically rather thin.

Like “Slow West” it’s also a chase film, beginning with the frantic pursuit of a young Japanese girl—the titular heroine, played by model and songwriter Kōki—by a band of bandits headed by the ruthless Sugarman (Tim Roth) and including his son Little Sugar (Jack Lowden) and a group of thugs with nicknames like Kitten (Roy McCann), Archer (Jamie Michie), Squid Lips (Jack Morris), Lazy Legs (Douglas Russell) and Psycho (Dennis Okwera).  Tornado is also being trailed by a young boy (Nathan Malone), a thief himself.  The two break into the house of an aristocrat (Alex Macqueen), which Sugarman and his crew trash searching for her in a sequence that blends suspense, nastiness and some bleak humor.

The reason behind all this is revealed later in flashbacks—Maclean’s script loves chronological shifts.  Tornado and her rigid father Fujin (Takehiro Hira) were touring the countryside giving puppet shows for the locals, in which their marionette samurai fought duels with swords that ended with them coming from behind the curtain to close with a battle they staged between themselves.  During a performance Tornado noticed the boy stealing two bags that Sugarman’s men had put down while watching the show, so she took them from the kid and stored them in the undercarriage of the horse-drawn wagon that served as their mobile home and theatre: the bags contained gold coins, the gang’s recent loot.

Unfortunately, Sugarman’s band caught up with them, and Fujin was killed in the ensuing confrontation, though he managed to wound Sugarman before expiring.  Tornado fled, the boy following her, and the gang pursuing them both after failing to find the bags in the wagon.  There’s a wrinkle here, however: Little Sugar, tired of taking orders from his father, plans to take the gold himself, which requires him to catch Tornado first and force her to admit where she’d hidden the stash.

The pursuit leads Tornado to seek shelter with Mint (Raphaël Thiéry), the strongman in the travelling circus run by Vienna Crawford (Joanne Whalley) in which she and her father had previously been players.  But Sugarman and his crew follow her there and terrorize the troupe.  Again the girl escapes, returning to the wagon to bury her father and find the gold.  Meanwhile Sugarman and Little Sugar have had a face-off that turns deadly.

Now the hunted becomes the hunter as Tornado seeks vengeance on Sugarman and his crew.  One by one she takes on the men who lie in wait for her.  The outcome is predictable, and the staging of the individual clashes surprisingly unimaginative. 

With “Tornado” Maclean demonstrates again that he has a distinctive voice and that, working with Ryan and his other craft collaborators—production designer Elizabeth El-Kadhi, costumer Kirsty Halliday, editors Ryan Morrison and Selina Macarthur, composer Jed Kurzel—he can evoke a world palpably different from ours.  Yet that world has an artificial feel, and the people inhabiting in it equally so.  Partially that’s because they’re thinly written, more sketches than rounded characters.  But it also results from the fact that the acting is, for the most part, pretty rudimentary, even from veterans like Roth and Lowden but more noticeably in the supporting cast.

And Kōki is a special case.  She certainly looks the part, and there are moments when she connects emotionally.  But too often her performance seems halting and uncertain, as if Maclean were directing her as Hitchcock is reputed to have directed Kim Novak in “Vertigo,” trying to control every gesture and movement.  The result is a turn that’s at times affecting, but only sporadically convincing. Her last-act swordsmanship is at best adequate.

In the end “Tornado” is, like “Slow West,” impressive in spurts but odd and ultimately unsatisfying as a whole.