Bag of Bones review

It is always hard to adapt a book into a movie. It is harder perhaps to adapt a Stephen King book, as he tries to give characters a lot of depth and does a lot of this with internal monologues; this is a huge challenge for screenwriters.
Bag of Bones, written in 1998 by the ‘master of horror’, has been re-created as a two part ‘mini-series’ starring Pierce Brosnan as Mike Noonan. As with many of King’s adaptions to the silver screen, this is directed by Mick Garris, with Matt Venne as the script-writer.
Mike Noonan’s wife has been killed in a traffic accident, and his grief leads him to go to his lake house in order to retreat from the world, to work on a novel he is writing. While there, a number of distractions prevent him from just getting on with his work. A single mother, messages from beyond their grave, and a lot of supernatural events.
The general consensus is that this is a terrible adaption of the book. The characters are stripped down and made two-dimensional, and in order to explain storylines dream sequences are used, and used excessively.
Being a show created for television, we are also subject to frequent commercials, which when combined with dream sequences makes you wonder what is the point of it all. Tag in all of the possible horror clichés, and you’ve got a very pointless movie. From phone calls without a voice to a raccoon jumping out from the shadows at a tense moment, all the clichés are in this film.
Brosnan tries very hard to work with the script he’s been given. So much so, that even when his scripted lines are simply ludicrous, he is still playing his role with an intensity that simply serves to highlight the preposterous. The rest of the acting is not much better, and it is hard to say whether the fault lies with the script, the casting or the actors. Regardless, it all adds up to be an overwhelming disappointment.
It is a real shame that yet another Stephen King movie has been attempted and has failed so badly. Despite some gore to appeal to the fan of the slasher genre, Bag of Bones comes across as tremendously silly. The book itself was very good but it just hasn’t been carried across to the big screen.