You're not gonna like it, but I prefer...
I kind of expected to come under fire when I originally posted this; I knew someone would accuse me of being one of those King purists who can't handle it when a director comes along and "improves" on one of his works. It didn't happen, not that I mind.
But while I am a big fan of King's work (and I even seem to enjoy the film adaptations a lot more than most people), The Shining never really stood out as one of his better books for me. I've no loyalty to this source material; I'm fine with Kubrick changing whatever he wants in that book to make a great film out of it. Or better yet, I'd rather have seen Kubrick tackle something like The Stand anyway.
But Kubrick tackled The Shining, and the result is, frankly, a rather poor, extremely bloated film that displays all the finesse and subtlety of a big loogie in the eye.
For starters, some of this movie just looks amateurish. The shadow of the helicopter shooting the aerial shots in the intro can very clearly be seen. Incessant tracking shots through the hotel become tiresome after a very brief while, and Kubrick could probably have phoned those in. And what's with the Overlook Hotel here? Let me get this straight - it's a hotel that's been here for decades, housed President after President, and it's clearly a "classic" kind of place, built and kept up for the ages, not just for the here and now. So why is it so 1970's-tacky? C'mon, a Motel 6 looks classier than this place.
Kubrick isn't the only one to blame, though. The two adult leads - Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall - are just lousy in their roles. Nicholson hams it up outrageously, obviously insane from the very first frame and never really being much more than a cackling fiend, a one-dimensional Freddy Krueger-like spewer of one-liners. After all this time, I don't understand why people find this performance effective. He's SILLY. Worse yet is Duvall, who reaches grotesque heights of blubbering with her sobbing, and even the film's fans admit to cheering for Jack when he chases her around with a baseball bat.
The kid, however, is good, and it's kind of cool that the spirit Tony lived in his finger. But Scatman Crothers is completely wasted, in a role that achieves nothing, comes to nothing, and only exists to provide the film's title, and for a very pedestrian shock near the end of the film.
That's the one word that sums up this movie. Pedestrian. How could such a phenomenally talented filmmaker, such an offbeat, original filmmaker, make such a pedestrian horror movie, loaded with cheap shocks and pointless, "Ooga-booga" stuff (like the old crone in the tub chasing Jack around for no reason)? The hotel pushing alcohol on Jack to drive him mad makes sense. Having a rotting, old woman chase him around? Silly, plain, and, well, dumb.
I'm making this movie sound like a complete waste of time, but there are a number of things I liked quite a bit about it. Jack's performance is pretty funny, really. The climactic chase through the hedge maze (a great idea, not in the book) was quite intense, and the scene where Jack is smashing down the bathroom door with the axe, trying to get at his wife, is wonderfully shot. The camera SLAMS toward the door with each swing, and the viewer really feels each impact. Rarely has kinetic energy been so well shown on screen. And yes, I loved "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy".
But overall, Kubrick's film is a turgid mess. On one hand, it's strange that after almost twenty years, this is still frequently hailed as a classic. But on the other hand, almost every review I've read for it (be it by a genre-specific author or otherwise) has deemed it quite middling. The movie was a big hit, and the fans seem to still love it; whatever one thinks about the movie, one has to admit to how long it has stayed in the public consciousness when even the critics have largely forgotten about it.
While Stephen King has said that he is quite dissatisfied with Kubrick's treatment of his novel, he did list the film amongst his personal favorites in his book Danse Macabre. So I'm really not sure how he feels about Kubrick's film. So, he decided to do it His Way, and he wrote up his own script and got the Stephen King House Director (Mick Garris) behind the camera for a miniseries, and let the cameras roll.
The result is a mixed bag, and while I'd hardly recommend it, it does have a lot to love, and at least has the impression of some effort being put into it by the cast and filmmakers.
Stephen Weber stars as Jack in the miniseries, and he's given a far tougher job than Nicholson was: to help create a humanized Jack who we feel for as he spirals from a struggling normalcy into madness. All Nicholson had to do was act like a maniac - in other words, the same silly role he always plays. Weber had to act. While he's saddled with some irritating, repeated lines that don't help him (it is unfortunately very, very King to have this guy repeat "Come down here and take your medicine!"), he doesn't provoke the unintended laughs the way Nicholson does.
If Weber edges out Nicholson, then Rebecca De Mornay completely shames Duvall as Wendy. De Mornay may not be a great actress, but she's a very capable one, and she infuses her character with some guts and intelligence. Duvall's Wendy is typical slasher-movie psycho fodder, a complete wuss with absolutely no appeal, too busy screaming and being a flake to survive very long (or make us hope she does).
The kid in King's Shining is about equal to that in Kubrick's, but his work is hampered by the fact that Tony looks like a big nerd and keeps appearing in person. This guy looks like the kind of guy who might be found wearing a Starfleet uniform, while sitting AT HOME, alone. This is not a very interesting Tony.
Of course, being a miniseries, this version of The Shining is way more bloated than Kubrick's film could ever be. Kubrick's movie clocked in at an outrageous 146 minutes - the miniseries, I believe, was 270! And nowhere does that padding show so much as it does in the first and last acts. I mean, it's really ridiculous. Both acts go on about twice, maybe three times as long as they need to (this handicap would repeat itself, although not as glaringly, in Storm Of The Century) There's this scene with the boiler at the beginning which telegraphs the ending with all the subtlety of skywriting. And what's with the CGI fire hose with teeth?
But the second act of King's The Shining is one of the best examples of TV horror I've seen produced in the past decade or so. The scene with marauding hedge animals was done with excellent restraint and pacing, only letting down in that third act. Even the rotten woman in the tub was effective here, Garris making this scene simultaneously one of quiet creepiness and thundering doom.
It ain't the popular opinion, but I'm definitely going to have to give the King/Garris Shining my recommendation over Kubrick's, though neither film is entirely satisfactory. I still maintain that the perfect director for a possible version of The Shining is Ridley Scott; he not only directed the best "haunted house"-style movie in a generation, Alien, but showed how skilfully he can weave architecture and set design into atmosphere and even the story itself, in Blade Runner. We'll almost certainly never see Ridley Scott's The Shining, but hey, I can dream, can't I?
2003 ADDENDUM
No, I haven't changed my mind. But a good guy named Sean pointed out an interesting essay about Kubrick's film, which brings up a lot of things I never even came close to noticing. It's a cool read for both fans and detractors of the film.