teleen_fiction | Dolan's Cadillac (Reply)

So I bought this movie when we were at Half-Price Books the other night. It was $7. 88 minutes. Roughly $.08 per minute.

Some background. It's based upon a short story by Stephen King, from the collection "Nightmares and Dreamscapes". It's my favorite of his stories for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the audiobook read by Rob Lowe.

I first read it when I was on a trip through New England and five Canadian Provinces the August after I graduated from high school. This story makes my nostalgic for a number of reasons. When I re-read it, I think of my late maternal grandmother and that trip, which was my graduation present. I also think of the audiobook, read so well by Rob Lowe, that I listened to several times while driving to and from my first jobs back when I was first an adult and still living in this very house, all those years ago.

I love the story.

Despite being a blatant Edgar Allan Poe ripoff, it's a gorgeous story of love and revenge. The protagonist is a cold-blooded ruthless killer disguised as a third-grade teacher. There is no pity in Robinson, no mercy, no keeping him from his eventual goal of killing his wife's killer.

One of the best parts of the short story is that you never know exactly what it is that Dolan does or what Elizabeth witnessed to make her a target - it's dismissed by Robinson's first-person narrative as unimportant to the story. And it is. All you need to know is that Dolan is an evil man who made a slip and Robinson's wife Elizabeth was there, at the wrong place and time, to see the slip.

That, and Elizabeth was brave.

When Rob Lowe reads the audiobook, he brings even the smallest of side characters to life with their own unique voices. He's an amazing reader and it would have been wonderful if he'd been cast to play Robinson.

He wasn't.

I had some slight hope when I bought the movie, because Wes Bentley (American Beauty) was cast as Robinson. I thought - that guy can do creepy.

But Christian Slater was cast as Dolan and... no. Dolan should have been played by Robert Loggia. He would have been utterly perfect. Ruthless and irredeemable.

The second problem with the movie is that it takes place mostly in the desert between Las Vegas and LA and yet it was shot in Vancouver, so instead of sand, you have brown grass.

The third problem is that the most important part of the story, the part where Robinson is actually setting up his trap, is reduced to a montage, which kills the film.

The fourth problem is that there are horrible voice-overs that steal lines unnecessarily from "The Stand" and try to turn Dolan into a sort of Randall Flagg sort of character (at least in Robinson's mind - there are no supernatural elements in the film). The original story was told in the first person and believe me when I tell you - they could have done the voice-overs word-for-word from the original and it would have been 100x better.

And this finally, is the major problem with the movie. It should have followed the story exactly. Instead, it gave us a bunch of shit we didn't need and took the focus away from Robinson and put it on Dolan and just how evil he is.

It made Robinson pathetic, something he never was.

It added unnecessary characters and subtracted others.

And the trap.

Ah, yes - the trap.

When the original story was being written, King contacted his brother to get the details exactly right because his brother knows math better tahn he does. In order for the trap to work, it had to be a funnel - not a slit-trench. What was it in the movie? A slit-trench. The ironic thing is that if you actually watch the scene where the Cadillac is trapped, you'll see that the producers had to do it correctly in order to get the car into the hole while it was being driven for the scene, but by the time you see the actors interacting, the Cadillac is in a grave, looking as though it was dropped into it with a crane (which I'm sure it was).

This movie failed in so many ways I can't even begin to list them all. It failed in casting. It failed in following the story. It failed at capturing the chilling essence of revenge that King captured so well in relatively few words.

And I'll tell you something else - it failed to truly show the HELL that Robinson went through in order to dig the grave.

It failed.

This movie was a festering speck of dog vomit that lays under the scum on the floor of a taxicab. It's the worst adaptation of a story I've enjoyed that I've ever had the misfortune to watch. My arse is owed something for having to sit there growing carbuncles through that piece of unimaginative drivel.

And the absolute worst part of this? I knew it was going to be bad when I bought it, but I had to know FOR CERTAIN. I had to see the level of the fail.

And now I'm going to thank every star in the heavens that my long-term memory for stuff like this is utter shit. In a couple of years, the only way I'll remember that I saw this at all is by seeing the review here.

Which is why I'm not completely itemizing the fail the way I did for "Cutthroat Island", :).

Now I just have to figure out the proper way of disposing of the DVD...