1 1/2 stars out of 5. The Lovely Bones: Starring Mark Wahlberg, Rachel Weisz and Saoirse Ronan; directed by Peter Jackson
Once considered an awards-season favourite, it's no surprise this adaptation of the beloved Alice Sebold novel The Lovely Bones faded off the radar. Despite a solid cast, a pedigree director and pretty visuals, this is one movie stinker to avoid like the second coming of Gigli.
If you've seen the trailer, which gives everything away and makes the 135 minute runtime feel like twice that, you should know the metaphysical premise. Susie Salmon (Atonement's Saoirse Ronan) is an imaginative young high schooler who aspires to one day become a photographer. Her dreams are nixed when next-door neighbour George Harvey decides to rape and murder her, banishing her to the in-between, on route to heaven.
But Susie isn't ready to go, so she sticks around in purgatory, where she still has a window to the real world, and can sometimes even influence events in it.
Meanwhile, her family is grief-stricken, including her OCD, model-ship-building dad Jack (Wahlberg), her blank slate housewife mom Abigail (Weisz), her alcoholic diva grandma (Susan Sarandon) and her tomboy, gym-rat sister Lindsey (Rose McIver) and they move around aimlessly trying to figure out who the killer is. While they try to move on with their lives, Susie climbs mountains, skates by blooming roses in a frozen lake, builds weird contraptions and hangs out in a gazebo with an odd Asian girl while waxing poetic BS about her life and the afterlife.
Nothing really happens until Susie decides to take a break from her annoying CGI paradise and interact with the world, and the living characters finally decide to have hunches about that creepy neighbour with the child molester moustache. You'd think the fact that the slimy, balding, single man talks with a drunken slur and enjoys building dollhouses when he isn't staring at young neighbourhood girls from his living room window (or car) would've attracted suspicions earlier.
The pacing is glacial, especially when we're forced to stomach Abigail's ceaseless metaphors from the frozen dreamscapes of the in-between. Most problematic is the lack of logic. Susie Salmon may narrate from a supernatural realm, but shouldn't there be rules to govern when and how she interacts with Earth? Early on she shows up to flicker candle flames and brush her spirit by certain characters on the street. Later, she possesses a girl for 15 minutes of true love with her high school crush (can we say disturbing for all the wrong reasons) and uses an icicle to kill a certain villainous someone, a few decades too late.
For the record, I have not read the tome on which the film is based, so I can't comment if the lethargic, inane plotting is simply staying true to the original story. This film takes an eternity to telegraph scenes where we already know the outcome and characters behave in magical ways that serve the awful plot points of the senseless story. What a catastrophic bore.
Mike Sage is a documentary filmmaker, editor and film critic. He can be reached at mikewsage@gmail.com.
