THE LANGOLIERS (1995) - Stephen King takes you to the Twilight Zone.

DIRECTED & WRITTEN by Tom Holland based on the Novella "The Langoliers" by Stephen King, taken from the book "Four Past Midnight".

STARRING  - Patricia Wettig as Laurel Stevenson,  Dean Stockwell as Bob Jenkins,  David Morse as Capt. Brian Engle,  Mark Lindsay Chapman as Nick Hopewell,  Frankie Faison as Don Gaffney,  Baxter Harris as Rudy Warwick,  Kimber Riddle as Bethany Simms,  Christopher Collet as Albert Kaussner,  Kate Maberly as Dinah Catherine Bellman, Bronson Pinchot as Craig Toomy.

PLOT - One dark and stormy night, a passenger plane flying from Los Angeles to Boston accidentally flies into a rift in time and space. Everybody who is awake on board is killed instantly - disintigrated into ashes with only non-organic matter like fillings or pace makers left behind to mark thier passing. Only those passengers who where asleep at the time the plane entered the rift are left alive. Among those survivors are a pilot who was flying home to attend to a family emergency, a British secret service agent, a writer with a strong sense of deductive abilities and a little blind girl who has the ability to sense danger and appears to have psychic powers.

Dinah - the blind girl - senses that something is coming for them. An evil force that wants them all dead. Craig Toomy, a businessman on the flight who appears to be having a mental breakdown, claims that this force is called the Langoliers and that they will all be eaten alive...

Landing at the nearest airport, the band of survivors find that they appear to be the only people left alive, the world around them seems dead and empty, frozen in time as if awaiting something...as if awaiting the arrival of the Langoliers...

DIALOUGE  - Nick - "Dinah says somethings coming towards us, rather nasty and at a rate of knots, and I for one believe her ! Now, having a knowledge of what it is may not save our lives, but I'm bloody sure the lack of its gonna put an end to us...and soon !"

PERFORMANCES  - As this is an adaptation of a Stephen King story there is no one central protaganist but rather a group of characters that we follow. As a result, this miniseries is more of an ensemble piece. The actors are all of a reasonable standard, some are very good, but as we shall see, this doesn't quite hang together as well as it should for several reasons.

Mark Lindsay Chapman plays Nick Hopewell, a British secret service agent, Nick is an assassin who is paid to 'clean up' embarrassing situations for the British Government. He's shown to be essentially a good man who is haunted by what he has had to do for his country and is re-evaluating his place in life. Basically, Nick is a working class version of James Bond and Chapman plays him as such. He does an ok job of this and would probably have made a decent stab at playing the actual 007. The thing that holds him back, however, is the dialogue he has been given to speak. 

What we get here is an American script writer's version of how English people speak and it's every bit as clichéd as you can imagine. Nick's dialogue is all 'cor blimey guvnor' cockney mixed with the occasional upper class 'old chap'ism. Every other word he says is 'bloody' this and 'bloody' that. Nick comes from the sort of stereotypical England where The Beatles live next door and everybody drinks tea with the 'bloody Queen'. It's terrible and really undermines what is otherwise a good character played by a decent actor. I don't know who was responsible for this script decision, whether it was Tom Holland or if it was present in King's original book (its so long ago since I read it that I can't remember), but whoever it is really needs to hop on a plane and fly over to the U.K to see how we actually speak over here.

Another good performance scuppered by the script is that of Dean Stockwell playing Bob Jenkins. Bob is a mystery novel writer and for some bizzare reason seems to figure out what is going on via some Sherlock Holmes style deduction. How a normal everyday novelist can figure out the workings of rifts in time and space and the behavior of extra-dimensional entities is anybodies guess, he might as well be Doctor Who, at least then we'd have a credible explanation for how he knows all this shit. Stockwell is always reliable and does what he can with the part but unfortunately the character just feels contrived.

David Morse playing the role of aircraft pilot Brian Engle fairs a little better. His all too convenient presence aboard the stricken plane is a bit lazy but that's just a dramatic convention and there would be no story without him, so we'll let that pass. Morse plays the character in a likeable way, he's perhaps the closest thing we get to a straightforward good guy in this and he seems to have slightly less laboured dialogue to speak than other members of the cast.

My favourite performance is that of Bronson Pinchot playing the story's human villain - Craig Toomy. Toomy is a businessman who appears to be undergoing a complete mental collapse. This seems to be triggered by several factors - executive stress, fear of flying, fear of what is happening around him and the spectre of his, presumably dead, father constantly screaming at him to do better, coupled with his own feelings of inadequacy. This mental break causes Toomy to make several foolish decisions which put everybody else in danger. Pinchot's performance is absolutely hyper, there is nothing subtle about it but its great and he steals every scene he's in. Imagine Nicholas Cage in full on 'Cage Rage' mode dialled up to a hundred and one and you can pretty much get the idea where Pinchot is coming from here and how he approaches the part. It's not a sympathetic portrayal of mental illness, it's very warts and all. You'll never like the character of Toomy but you will at least understand him and why he is the way he is.

All the rest of the cast do as well as they can. Frankie Faison plays Don, the black guy who is the first to die. Patricia Wettig as Laurel basically spends most of the series mooning over Nick and acting as defacto mother to creepy blind kid Dinah. Baxter Harris as Rudy spends most of the story eating and sleeping, I think he's supposed to be the comedic relief but I'm not sure. Kimber Riddle is likeable as Bethany, a recovering junkie which doesn't really impact upon the story in any way, shape or form, and Christopher Collet plays Albert who becomes Dr. Watson to Bob's Sherlock Holmes, he's the geek who gets the girl as he ends up with Bethany at the story's close. All of the actors are OK but all are hampered with dodgy dialogue which makes some of the scenes feel a bit flat.

SFX - So here we are at the special effects part of the review...dear God ! The titular Langoliers turn out to be razor toothed, hairy "Pac Men" that eat time, space and anything else that gets in their way. They are an entirely CGI creation and they have NOT aged well...

Just look at those ropey computer graphics, I doubt they even looked that great way back in 1995. Look how ragged they are, how they just sit there with no sense of weight or solidity to them. They just look cheap and nasty.

You get poor old Bronson Pinchot acting his heart out in his death scene, giving it his all and it all looks completely ridiculous. In a scene that's meant to be highly tense and dramatic, the scary setpiece that the entire three hours have been building up to, you just find yourself laughing...

Please somebody, in the name of all that is holy, at least consider redoing the CGI and replace it with something better. It wouldn't be hard with today's technology and probably wouldn't cost that much either. Any investment that was made would probably be made back just by the saleability of King's name being attached to it. Release it in a nice, shiny Blu-Ray and you'd be laughing.

SEX & VIOLENCE  - Very little - there's a fatal stabbing and Toomy gets a good kicking off Nick and a second, equally deserved, kicking from Albert. He then gets eaten by the Langoliers...

We do also get a child being fatally wounded, so if you're a parent and this type of thing upsets you then consider this a fair warning.

RATING  - The Langoliers is a strange offering. It's very nearly brilliant, it's also very nearly awful. The story itself is very good. I read the original Stephen King novella when I was Seventeen and absolutely loved it, I read it again in my Thirties and still enjoyed it. The story is very much like an extended episode of the Twilight Zone, its got that same feel of ordinary people being shunted sideways into a strange and bizzare realm. The miniseries shares that aspect with the book and puts it across atmospherically and efficiently. The characters are also interesting and although prone to the whims of narrative convenience they all do what they should in the story and it works and moves along like a well oiled engine.

As I said earlier, the problems with this miniseries arise from the poor forced dialogue that some of the actors are hampered with and those terrible, TERRIBLE, computer generated special effects. 

This miniseries had a lot of potential but its let down badly in several areas. Its a good story and its still entertaining to watch but its flaws become very apparent very quickly. I'm giving this 3 killer Pac Men out of 5. A good idea let down by silly mistakes. If they don't release a brushed up reedited version of this then they should do a modern day remake with better effects and a script with less clunky dialogue... Oh, and they should get Nick Cage to play Toomy and let him go batshit mental onscreen. That would be awesome.