The Road, Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize winning masterpiece about a despairing father and son shuffling their way across a lawless post-apocalytpic America, had its cinematic cues inbuilt. The haunting doom-poetry of McCarthy’s perfect book gave potential adaptors plenty to work with as well as a large and keen audience (The Road was an international bestseller and even featured on Oprah’s bookclub where she recommended it unreservedly).

So why director John Hillcoat, who had worked with Nick Cave and made the quirky The Proposition, has apparently gone out of his way to erase each and every lurking moment of spectral power and eye-popping ‘whack’ moments from the original text is anyone’s guess. This long-awaited film could have been a great movie, but it’s barely a good one.

Gone is the relentless sense of maruading treachery and torture and madness around every ash-strewn corner. Missing is the rickety cave monster with white spider eyes that clanked its bony way into a disturbed man’s nightmare, as is the shuffling troupe of manacled young boys lashed to captors who used them for sex then carved them up for food.

And what happened to the book’s most searing moment, when the young boy stumbles upon a starving family cooking up their newborn baby on an ad-hoc spit? These weren’t just haunted-house moments of quick shock, they helped set McCarthy’s sublime scene and kept important character cogs turning.

In their place are endless jaw-flapping from the father about the value of honour to his wide-eyed, wimpy son and a dim palette of silvers and greys that doesn’t evoke the brittle sense of doomsday that the story calls for. The bedraggled pair limp from one indistinct part of the road to another and every scene is visually flat and overloaded with ponderous, pretentious dialogue.

In The Road, all plants and animals have died and food is as scarce as hen’s teeth and so in the book the father and son say as little as possible to each other as they need to conserve their precious energy to keep moving south to hit warmer weather before winter hits and they die in the freezing cold. Here, they run the risk of talking themselves to death, not to mention being captured by cannibals who would have no trouble following all the noise.

Viggo Mortensen plays the father with pious, almost Christ-like boringness but the flatline script doesn’t really give him any option. Kodi Smit-McPhee looks too much like Nicholas Hoult in About A Boy to be effective here and his valiant efforts to flesh out a spooked boy who has eaten next-to-nothing for at least a month is undermined just a little by his chubby cheeked rosiness.

And what the fuck is Charlize Theron, 2009 face of Dior’s J’Adore perfume among other things, doing in a series of autumnal flashback scenes to happier days? Everytime we detour back to her lips and cheekbones not to mention her various pets which include a horse and a cute dog we’re reminded just how dreadfully misguided Hillcoat’s movie is. This road is long, that’s for sure, and has many a winding turn but unfortunately none of them are particularly interesting.

The Road is screening nationally.

Watch the trailer here: