Review of Doctor Sleep (2019) by Theredsky — 13 Nov 2019

The Stanley Kubrick version of The Shining is awesome. They had so much potential to make a sequel to The Shining and they executed it like this. It was a huge disappointment for me. This movie does have a talented cast but they are put into such a disappointing movie.

I thought that Ewan McGregor and Rebecca Ferguson did a great job and bring some enjoyment to this film but their characters are incredibly weak. I don’t how it was possible to make an already existing and developed character weak but they did that to Danny Torrance in this movie.

His only character trait is that he wants to help people but that’s it. Rebecca Ferguson’s character is pretty weak too. Her only motivation is that she wants to live for a while which is fine but she has no character to back it up.

Although, there are sequences with her character that are visually interesting and peaked my interest a little bit. I thought the story was fine I guess. I have never read the Doctor Sleep novel so I can’t say whether it was faithful or not.

The 3rd act was dreadful though. All it was was hey do you remember how great The Shining was over and over again. It recreated a bunch of scenes from the original and somehow managed to make them worse.

It’s solely relying on if you remember The Shining or not instead of being interesting. There are only two aspects of the 3rd act I appreciated. I thought that the score rendition of The Shining theme was good albeit not as iconic as the original theme and there is a Jack Nicholson look alike that does a pretty good job at looking and sounding like Jack Nicholson.

I can’t say that for all of the look alikes though. Instead of finding people who looked like Shelley Duvall and Danny Lloyd, they just completely recast them and it’s terrible. Doctor Sleep is 2 and a half hours long and it does not deserve that runtime.

They should have just cut it down to just about 2 hours. The added time just makes parts of the film flat out boring. There are some other technical aspects that I thought were bad. There is this stupid heartbeat sound effect they use at least 30-40 times throughout the film and it is incredibly annoying and some of the visuals later in the film looked pretty bad.

Overall, Doctor Sleep may have some good performances but it's over reliance on being related to The Shining, being much longer than it should, and weak characters make this one of the biggest disappointments of the year for me.