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Every review of Thinner you hear or read will be a bad one, and justifiably so: this movie sucked, and that's compared to an entire summer of movies that sucked. That having been said, I found this to be the fourth best Stephen King movie ever. For the record, here's my King movie ranking: 1. It, 2. The Shining, 3. The Tommyknockers, 4. Thinner, 5. and below, who cares!
But let me clarify some things here: It, The Shining, and the Tommyknockers were truly good.Thinner sucked. And the only reason Thinner was better than any of the other King movies that sucked (and the list is long and distinguished) is that the first half was actually not bad, whereas the other sucky King movies sucked from the get-go.
Despite comments to the contrary, the main character was convincing as a fat dude, makeup be damned. The part was played beautifully overall, the perfect portrayal of a sleazy lawyer who doeesn't know what a sleaze he really is. The audience squirmed visibly during his eating-binge scenes, and his transformation from jolly to deadly-serious was subtle and quite complete.
But nevertheless, the movie did indeed start to suck about midway through, with the imbecilic plot twists and dumbass supporting actors we've come to expect from Stephen King movies. It's a shame, too, because there's no reason this film couldn't have kept up the savvy suspense we saw in the beginning. The audience had to endure entire sequences (lasting 5 or 10 minutes or more) which added absolutely nothing to the story whatever, another King movie trademark. And the ending was as big a let-down as I've ever seen in any movie.
Thinner's only real plus is that you'll be hard-pressed to do any better in the theaters until Star Trek: First Contact comes out in late November. Appropriately, Independence Day comes out on video the same day First Contact is supposed to come out in theaters; between these two movies lies most of the quality you're going to see in the 1996 movie year.
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