Summary:
A fat lawyer begins rapidly loosing weight after gypsies curse him.
My Thoughts:
I just finished reading King’s “Doctor Sleep” in preparation for the film that will hit theaters this fall, and it put me in the mood to watch some Stephen King movies. While I am a rather large fan of King’s work, I haven’t seen many of the plethora of his films that plagued theaters in the 90s, because, well, they have a reputation for being rather schmaltzy. Recently, I’ve been going through some of them for the first time, and “Thinner” was streaming on Amazon, so I decided to give it a go.
Stephen King writes a lot (as of this moment he’s written eighty-eight books), and if you’ve ever listened to interviews with the guy, even he has admitted that some of his stories are less than stellar. And, when writers garner as big of a cult following as King, it’s inevitable that even some of the less impressive stories will be adapted into films. I haven’t read this particular novel of King’s, and after watching this movie I don’t think I ever will. I have a hard time believing there was enough meat to this story to make a compelling novel; maybe a short story… maybe.
“Justice ain’t about bringing back the dead, white man. Justice is about justice.”
After Lawyer Billy Halleck (Robert John Burke, “Tombstone”) kills an old gypsy woman by accidentally running over her with his car, he weasels his way out of the consequences by using some of his connections with the prosecutor and judge. After the case is settled, the gypsy’s father (Michael Constantine, “My Big Fat Greek Wedding”) curses Billy and the others involved, and Billy begins to loose weight at an alarming rate. Will he be able to reverse the curse before it’s too late, or will Billy waste away to nothing?
So, really, there’s nothing remotely scary about this film. The whole point of the movie is that Billy’s character looses an extraordinary amount of weight in a fast time, but Billy isn’t exactly gargantuan to begin with (he’s big, sure, but he’s no elephant) and he never gets to the point of looking skeletal or anorexic (until the end, but then he just looks silly- like a caricature from a Tim Burton film). More than anything this movie was boring. We just watch a skinny man in a fat suit put on less and less fat in every scene. To make matters worse, Billy isn’t particularly concerned with his weight loss in the first forty-five minutes of the film; he just thinks it’s normal to suddenly loose weight, so we just watch a guy wandering around while eating a lot. If you want a good gypsy curse movie watch “Drag Me to Hell”, at least that movie had some tension, and it also boasted a fair amount of humor as well.
Billy’s character wasn’t particularly likeable; he is a fat slob who spends most of his time slurping down food, and, at the beginning, he kills someone and gets away with it. We find out that Billy’s wife Heidi (Lucinda Jenney, “Thelma and Louise”) is cheating on Billy within the first twenty minutes of the movie, so that doesn’t exactly make her particularly likeable either. Billy’s friend Richie (Joe Mantegna, “House of Games”) is a bit of a sleaze, so he’s not exactly sympathetic. And the gypsies in the movie act as antagonists… so whom am I supposed to be rooting for in this film? The curse itself? The only character that is remotely likeable is Billy’s daughter Linda (Bethany Joy Lenz), and she has absolutely no impact on the story as a whole.
I honestly had a hard time coming up with anything positive to say about this movie; I truly think this might be one of the worst King adaptations I’ve seen. I suppose if I do have to say one positive thing, it’s that this movie does have some good makeup in some scenes (though, in others, the makeup is pretty abysmal, borderline silly). The weight fluctuation is a big part of this movie, and for probably sixty percent of the film, the fat suit actually looks pretty decent. For the other forty percent of the film, however, you can clearly see make up lines and sometimes lumpy fat displacement.
Verdict:
This movie is pretty bad. It’s pretty boring too. I had hope that since this was from the director of “Child’s Play” we would at least get some spooky/fun moments, but we got nothing of the sort. At least in some King adaptations, there’s a lot of ridiculous stuff going on so there’s something to laugh at. In this film, there’s none of that. It’s just a boring, twist-free waltz towards an ending we all see coming.
End Note: Stephen King makes a brief cameo as the pharmacist in this movie. That scene was the most excited I got during the whole film, and nothing really happens in that scene.
Review Written By: