John Carpenter’s Christine

Directed by John Carpenter, John Carpenter’s Christine follows Keith Gordon’s Arnie Cunningham as he sheds his nerdy persona after impulsively buying a broken-down 1958 Plymouth Fury named Christine. Filmmaker Carpenter, armed with Bill Phillips’ screenplay, delivers a watchable yet rarely enthralling adaptation of Stephen King’s superior (and decidedly overlong) 1983 novel, and there’s little doubt, ultimately, that John Carpenter’s Christine fares especially poorly within its sluggish, oddly momentum-free first half – with the picture’s passable atmosphere, then, due almost entirely to Donald M. Morgan’s often hypnotic visuals and a stirring central performance from Gordon. And while the movie never becomes as engrossing as one might’ve hoped, John Carpenter’s Christine admittedly does benefit from a midsection that’s been peppered with a few appreciatively lively digressions – including (and especially) a terrific sequence wherein a bully is stalked and murdered by an on-fire Christine. The underwhelming finale, however, ensures that the whole thing concludes on a rather anticlimactic note, which effectively (and definitively) confirms John Carpenter’s Christine as a decent-enough endeavor that feels like it could (and should) be so much better.

**1/2 out of ****