Movie Nation

Speaking as a critic who’s been “blurbed” a few times over the decades, you’ve got to recognize the double-edged sword such “recognition” in the advertising on a poster for a movie is. That’s you, out there, effusive in your praise, struggling to come up with a coherent, grammatical endorsement of a movie you loved.

And if, as some of the breathless shills for “The Life of Chuck” are insisting, it’s a “life altering experience,” “profoundly magical” and an “It’s a Wonderful Life’ for today,” they’re on safe ground.

But if it isn’t — and it most decidedly is not — at least they have the comfort of knowing that nobody will fling their words back at them from a DVD box or a collectible poster, as in days of yore. Because nobody’s collecting the poster for this, and I dare say few will be buying it on Bluray for their collection.

It’s a cloying, feel-good end-of-the-world story that reaches for emotions in a few stand-out moments, and grasps for many others that just aren’t there. Based on a late-life Stephen King novella, it leans on dance scenes, the words of Walt Whitman and Carl Sagan and Gimme Some Lovin'” by the Spencer Davis Group (“Little” Stevie Winwood on vocals and organ) to give you the “feels.”

Sometimes that works, and often it annoys, a 101 minute annoyance about facing death and the end of times dryly narrated to DEATH by Nick Offerman.

But if Stephen King was feeling nostalgic, wistful and philosphical about “the end,” having survived into old age, a near fatal running-over by a van, decades of coming in and out of favor and the task of passing his horror baton to his son Joe Hill, we owe him this indulgence. Director and screenwriter Mike Flanagan (“Doctor Sleep,” the recent “House of Usher,” “Hill House” and “Bly House” horror series) we owe a lot less.

A cascading torrent of calamities have befallen the Earth — sinkholes and tsunamis, California is sliding off into the sea, vast chunks of it at a time and it’s the End of the Internet as We Know It. There’s nothing for it but to stare into the night sky and watch planets and stars wink-out of existence and resign ourselves to a favorite Carl Sagan quote about the fleeting nature of time, “the great clock of the universe,” and our tiny lives within it.

Sagan’s “We are like mayflies, fleeting ephemeral creatures who live out their lives in the course of a single day,” isn’t quoted in the movie. But it informs every downbeat moment of it.

Chiwetel Ejiofor plays a midwestern teacher trying to keeps his students — and their parents at parent-teacher conferences — focused on their studies with the world ending around them and life serving up day after day of bad news, work-arounds and drive-arounds as society, civilization and life breaks down. Suicides are rampant, something the teacher’s ex-wife/nurse (Karen Gillan) is struggling with.

But this former couple has a bigger concern. “The end…Who do you want to be with for it?”

All around them, on billboards, on radio, the Internet and TV before all that vanishes, are ads congratulating “Chuck Krantz” for “39 Great Years.” It’s become a joke, and in this movie, that joke is a “cosmic” one.

Chuck (Tom Hiddleston) lived his life of comfy “quiet desperation” as an accountant. But in the movie’s signature knock-out moment, this accountant at a conference stops on hearing the busking of street drummer Taylor Gordon, and breaks into dance. As a crowd gathers, a just-jilted-bookstore clerk (Annalise Basso) is coaxed into the city square to dance with him.

“The Life of Chuck” will tell Chuck’s story in reverse order from that moment, how he (Benjamin Pajak, Cody Flanagan and Jacob Tremblay play younger Chucks) lost his parents as a child, was raised by his grandparents (Mark Hamill and “Ferris Bueller” alumna Mia Sara), how he discovered the childhood joy of dancing with his granny, rediscovering that in school and then casting aside that love to be practical and take up accounting like his grandfather.

Chuck’s “congratulations” messaging takes a supernatural turn as the movie progresses and we see him on his deathbed, presumably before The World Ends, comforted by his wife (“New World” Pocahontas Q’orianka Kilcher), perhaps reconciled to the Big Message of this over-narrated wade into what “28 Years Later” reminded us about life and why we should live it while we have the chance — “Memento mori.”

Through it all, a story told in reverse order (more or less), our endlessly opining voice-over narrator redundantly reminds us of the Great Imponderables of The End, as many a character must “wonder why God made the world.”

This feel good “worlds’ end” dramedy isn’t as uplifting as “Seeking a Friend for the End of the World,” isn’t as sad and fatalistic as “On the Beach.” King and Flanagan lack the writerly/cinematic existential heft to truly ponder “the end” from an old man’s perspective the way Orson Welles did throughout his career, from “Citizen Kane” and “Magnificent Ambersons” to “Chimes at Midnight” and “The Other Side of the Wind.”

So their point, such as it is, amounts to little or nothing.

Offerman’s reading of Flanagan and King’s narration never goes deeper than glum and never rises above glib. The performances are competent and some players have “moments,” but by and large they don’t register in much more than an archetypal sense.

“The Life of Chuck” has a resignation and a timeliness to it that render any “escape” it might offer moot. Every viewer brings his or her own baggage into the cinema, but whatever might have touched many seems buried under disorganized treacle.

It’s no wonder that apocalypse movies are all the rage this year. Missiles flying in the Middle East, distracting from an ongoing genocide, a snake oil salesman in charge of American health care and a soulless con man with his finger on the button that could generate End Times, forever boasting of his cunning plan to end Federal disaster relief, it’s all a little too grim to get away from by slipping into a cinema for a generally dull downer of a movie.

“Profoundly magical?” All this facile, faux fatalistic film lacks is a Bobby McFerrin sing-along over the closing credits. Then again, they’d probably have Offerman narrate that, too.

Rating: R, profanity

Cast: Tom Hiddleston, Jacob Tremblay, Annalise Basso, Q’orianka Kilcher, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Karen Gillan, Carl Lumbly, Mia Sara and Mark Hamill, narrated by Nick Offerman.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Mike Flanagan, based on the novella by Stephen King. A Neon release.

Running time: 1:51