The novel "John Dies at the End" is a messy but vibrant read. It was published originally in installments on the Internet, and it reads as such: disjointed, with plot strands trailing off into never-never-land, but full of such creativity and imagination it makes it easy to overlook its flaws. The book is like a little bit of Stephen King mixed with a whole lot of Douglas Adams.
I was cynical about a screen adaptation mostly because I knew so many of the fantastical beasts and incidents that people the novel were going to be given literal shape in the movie, and the tangible can never compete with the imagined. And that is a big flaw of the movie, but it's only one of many and isn't even the biggest. Probably most damaging to the film is the fact that the two young actors who play our protagonists aren't good enough to land any of the script's jokes, many of them lifted directly out of the book. The humor lands with a thud on screen, leaving us as an audience not even sure whether or not what we just heard was a joke. If I hadn't read the book, I'm not sure I'd even know that this material is mostly supposed to be comedy.
But the actors are only part of the problem. The script is a jagged hack job, faithfully adapting the first quarter of the book with dogged fidelity, and then compressing the last three quarters of it into a rushed and nearly incomprehensible mush. I can't even begin to imagine what someone unfamiliar with the source material would take away from this film's finale.
I knew we were in trouble from the get go, when our pair of protagonists go to battle against a supernatural being made out of meat, and the result is a scene that in the book was hilarious and in the movie is just...well...stupid. And that's a way to summarize the entire movie.
Grade: C-
I was cynical about a screen adaptation mostly because I knew so many of the fantastical beasts and incidents that people the novel were going to be given literal shape in the movie, and the tangible can never compete with the imagined. And that is a big flaw of the movie, but it's only one of many and isn't even the biggest. Probably most damaging to the film is the fact that the two young actors who play our protagonists aren't good enough to land any of the script's jokes, many of them lifted directly out of the book. The humor lands with a thud on screen, leaving us as an audience not even sure whether or not what we just heard was a joke. If I hadn't read the book, I'm not sure I'd even know that this material is mostly supposed to be comedy.
But the actors are only part of the problem. The script is a jagged hack job, faithfully adapting the first quarter of the book with dogged fidelity, and then compressing the last three quarters of it into a rushed and nearly incomprehensible mush. I can't even begin to imagine what someone unfamiliar with the source material would take away from this film's finale.
I knew we were in trouble from the get go, when our pair of protagonists go to battle against a supernatural being made out of meat, and the result is a scene that in the book was hilarious and in the movie is just...well...stupid. And that's a way to summarize the entire movie.
Grade: C-