A mysterious man signs on as a border in the home of a young boy and his detached mother. Based on the Best Selling Stephan King novel.

To quote a famous commercial: "Where's the beef?" King has provided for us the interesting characters; I was looking to the director to bring the story home. Pretty much anyone who speaks in this film I thought was interesting but the whole thing never really took off or left me amazed. Decent dialogue and interpersonal relationships were largely (although not entirely) wasted by some choppy editing and few plot twists.

If this had been more of a "movie experiment" I probably wouldn't judge so harshly, but we've seen this sort of story before (The Green Mile, among others) and Mr. Hicks is also not a stranger to cinema of this scope, so he should've had this down by now.

Directed by Scott Hicks.