thomas4cinema

It took me a while to collect the courage necessary to overcome the tsunami of terrible reviews that drowned this Peter Jackson “small project” (as compared to the Rings and the Monkeys, sure, but the film does not really look cheap) upon release. I only heard ghastly things about the film and its depiction of afterlife in particular. But, hey! It’s the guy who made “Beautiful Creatures” and Gollum and it’s about a serial killer, what can possibly go wrong? Let’s say: I was not as offended by the film as some of the reviewers I had read. After about 40 minutes, however, I started to get terribly bored. The story was going nowhere, it was not really a killer movies or a coping with dying movie or “what’s it like to be in heaven?”-movie. It’s just plenty of empty screen space covered with indeed very annoying colour and special effects schemes. There are some nice moments, such as when our heroine gets actually caught and (spoiler alert, haha, this is a film about a guy killing a girl, remember?) killed. The 30 seconds the film takes until it actually tells us (and the girl realizes) something is wrong are well played out. Stanley Tucci with a Russell Crowe hair is workable creepy, Mary Mark from the underpants ads is a bit over the top, but pretty as ever …

The visualization of afterlife… I remember a Robin Williams movie with similarly goofy-coloured afterlife scenes, and I was thinking that that older movie had been much more terrible. No, it was not that vain effort that made Lovely Bones a bit of a waste of time, but just the absence of anything really interesting.

And some terrible terrible music towards the end.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lovely_bones_film