THE LIFE OF CHUCK**

I don't get the Toronto film festival audience hype for the latest Stephen King adaptation, THE LIFE OF CHUCK. It barely feels like a film at all, but two short films that do not cohere.  I wasn't moved: I didn't get it.  To be fair, I really liked part one.  It's a dystopian future where the world has been overtaken by climate change.  In affluent America, a divorced but friendly husband and wife (Chiwetel Ejiofor and Karen Gillan) potter about their everyday lives, navigating the rising suicide rates and the intermittent loss of the internet.  The quiet, calm observation of how the end of the world might intrude upon our everyday lives is well observed and an interesting thought experiment. The only weird note is that they keep seeing billboards thanking an accountant called Chuck for his great life - "the last internet meme".  We never learn what was behind the billboards, but we do then flip into Chuck's backstory. He's an orphaned kid raised by his charismatic grandparents - Mark Hamill as the sardonic, weary but fun grandpa has his best role in years.  Chuck learns to dance with his grandma and has two dance set pieces - one with the young Chuck at a school dance and another with the adult Chuck and a busker.  Adult Chuck is played by Tom Hiddleston, who is himself an internet meme with his love of dance. So it doesn't feel like a character is dancing but Tom is on another instagram reel. The social media notoriety actually took me out of the story, insofar as I was ever in it, and the dance scene had none of the loose breaking free of Mads Mikkelsen in ANOTHER ROUND.  What's the message of this strange film? That we all contain multitudes because we contain memories of all the people that we have ever loved? I can get behind that. That we are so narcissistic we think the whole world existed so we could dance? Er...okay.  Strange film. Doesn't work. 

THE LIFE OF CHUCK is rated R and has a running time of 111 minutes. It was released in the USA in June and will be released in the UK on August 22nd.