Paramount Blu-ray
Speaking of an over-reliance of computer generated effects! Peter Jackson goes out of his way to insult your intelligence by creating a rainbow filled, candy colored heaven in a movie where a little girl is raped and murdered. This is quite possibly the most painful viewing experience I have had in a decade. It is based on the novel by Alice Sebold about a teenage girl growing up in the suburbs in the seventies. She lives a perfect existence until some creep down the street (played sweatily and completely over the top by Stanley Tucci) drags her in to an underground room and kills her etc.. Thankfully the scene is not very graphic which is a complaint in the Entertainment Weekly review! Seriously! After that her "spirit"? drifts between the real world and her own heaven so she can narrate the next four hours or however long this thing took. In the real world her happy family (Mark Wahlberg, Rachel Weisz) begins to fall apart until her younger sister uncovers the culprit. I will now give the requisite spoiler alert because I would like to mention the ridiculous retribution bestowed upon Mr. Tucci's fiend. After eluding capture and driving to who knows where, Tucci tries to pick up another young girl at a cafe. She turns him down and then he slips off a cliff where his completely computer generated body gets bounced around and mangled by the rocks below. Yeah for random justice. One of the worst devices in writing is when you are supposed to find closure in a completely random event that was not set in motion or directly effected by a main character in the story. This is sloppy film making and a pointless exercise in futility. It's impossible to figure what exactly Jackson's intentions are here. Is it to establish that he believes in a Christian heaven? That pedophiles are bad? That violence can destroy a family? He never clearly sets out to explicitly say any of these things but infers all of them no matter how obvious they might be. The final product just flops between being obnoxious and lifeless.
1/10
And don't forget the wacky grandma montage set to CCR. The book is so good, I would love to have seen what original director Lynne Ramsay would have done with the same source material.
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