The Life of Chuck — for better or worse — dances to the end of the world

The Life of Chuck is a film told in reverse. 

This is not an especially novel conceit — we are most of us years past the days of sitting in friends' basements, staring in slack jawed, smoke-clouded awe at the end of Memento.

But neither are the various other conceits of this latest Stephen King adaptation (unbelievably, just the second of at least five more King adaptations scheduled for the next year) when compared with the horror workhorse's canon.

And while it may be something of a spoiler to explain just how this film's three acts (starting — predictably — with the third) tell the tale of our eponymous lead, unfortunately it's necessary. Because if you did not know this was a metaphor-driven story about mild-mannered Chuck's tragically short life told in reverse — and not always featuring him — this already convoluted narrative would be just about impossible to discuss. 

But reliable as ever for King, the real point of this journey is how we get there — as always, in those reliably predictable conceits of his writing. There is the typical onerous schmaltz: right from the first "act," following burned-out teacher Marty Anderson (Chiwetel Ejiofor) searching for his ex-wife Felicia Gordon (Karen Gillan) in what very much seems like the final days of a modern apocalypse.

It is a sort of mini love story, yes. But it is also a vehicle for King — and by extension, our director and now serial King-adaptor Mike Flanagan — to cram in their maybe just-too-sweet fairy tale clichés. 

The way Chuck dishes out those clichés is an exercise in scattershot sentimentality. For example, did you know that Carl Sagan's "cosmic calendar" — which relatively shrinks the history of the universe into one calendar year — is a great metaphor for our own fleeting mortality?

Did you know that waxing philosophical about exactly how long it takes the Earth to make a full rotation (hint, it's not 24 hours) can be spun into a cute, cinematic parable? Just have it explained by a bespoke, elderly mortician with the adorably, tragically doomed lifelong dream of becoming a weatherman. 

And hey, did you know we could turn this whole thing into what basically amounts to an Aesop's fable? Just stick a surreal ad campaign above all the carnage — inexplicably congratulating some stranger named Chuck on his retirement after "39 great years" — and let your characters remark on how absurd it all is.

Pair it with end-of-the-world imagery eerily similar to today's headlines, and just try and keep from interpreting everything as a metaphor. I dare you.

At the same time, we have the trite King-isms: the lyrical, sing-songily hokey lines that read as if yanked right from an episode of Leave It to Beaver. For example: the little rollerblading girl Marty encounters, cheerfully exclaiming that "Ms. Gordon gives us gingersnap cookies sometimes!" as if kids still pull their vocab from Bazooka Joe bubblegum instead of Big Justice and The Rizzler. 

Or there are the Disney-fied phrases that simply scream of being airlifted from from the novella it was based on. As we move backwards into our second act, our narrator introduces us to the Chuck in question: a man so aggressively bland, so ironically unaware of his own stellar uniqueness he's "dressed in the armour of accountancy: grey suit, white shirt, blue tie." 

In contrast, that quote seems to be so proud of itself neither the film's advertisers nor its stars have been able to stop from regurgitating it at every possible moment. 

But as we move on, back to our third (first) act, we encounter maybe the most reliable King calling card. The life of childhood Chuck (as he ages, played by Cody Flanagan, Benjamin Pajak and Jacob Tremblay) is awash in the twin themes of innocent boyhood, and an innocently nostalgic, gingham-wearing, non-door-locking America that may or may not have ever actually existed.