The Lovely Bones (2009) Review

Time: 135 Minutes
Age Rating: contains violence
Cast:
Saoirse Ronan as Susie Salmon
Stanley Tucci as George Harvey
Mark Wahlberg as Jack Salmon
Rachel Weisz as Abigail Salmon
Susan Sarandon as Grandma Lynn
Michael Imperioli as Detective Len Fenerman
Director: Peter Jackson

After being brutally murdered, 14-year-old Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan) watches from heaven over her grief-stricken family (Mark Wahlberg, Rachel Weisz) — and her killer (Stanley Tucci). As she observes their daily lives, she must balance her thirst for revenge with her desire for her family to heal.

The Lovely Bones looked like it had all the elements for a great film. It had a great cast including Saoirse Ronan and Stanley Tucci, was based off a murder mystery book with fantastical elements, and was directed by Peter Jackson of all people. So it just was a shame that the movie didn’t turn out to be all that good really that good.

I’ve never read the book of the same name, so I’m just judging the movie as it is. The setup is reasonably straightforward, lead character is killed by killer, and the lead character is in purgatory watching events happen. After that though, it all just sort of falls apart. First of all, the tone is pretty weird and all over the place. As I just said, murder plays a big part of the movie. At the same time there’s a lot of random comedy, for example there’s a particularly comedic scene with Susan Sarandon and it doesn’t work with the rest of the movie. Maybe it was aiming to be a dark comedy of sorts, but I was trying to even look at this it from that angle and that still didn’t work as that. The approach to the afterlife was even weirder, especially with how Jackson decided to portray it on a visual level. Aside from occasionally watching over her family and friends and trying to communicate with them, it’s just Susie watching from her place and not doing much. Not only that but the story too, it is approached with a family friendly sort of way, and that just doesn’t work. Even though it’s not shown on screen, the setup of the movie is that the main character gets raped and murdered by a killer, at this point one probably shouldn’t be trying to make that story a movie with a PG-13 approach. I just wasn’t all that invested with what was going on, not with the thriller and murder level, and not on the supernatural afterlife level either. It’s a shame because there was some potential. After the murder, it felt like they didn’t know what to do with the concept. The writing itself isn’t particularly good, the dialogue can be particularly bad. The ending was particularly weak, and without spoiling anything, the message at the end of all is more than a little questionable, whether it’s intentional or not.

The cast is pretty talented, but the acting is a bit mixed, there are really two highlights that stand out among the rest. Saoirse Ronan’s acting as the lead character of Susie isn’t one of the best performances of her career, but she plays the role as best as she possibly can, and adds quite a lot to the movie. The highlight performance of the movie however is Stanley Tucci as the killer. This is one of those performances where a familiar and likable actor plays such a dark and different role from what they are used to, and they pulling it off seamlessly. Tucci’s character already shows early signs of being a killer and at times it gets a little silly, but at the same time there are many parts to him that feel creepily naturally. Mark Wahlberg’s performance here is a big of a mixed bag. Generally he’s at least okay enough at acting but his acting here reminded me a lot of his performance from The Happening, and it was just rather hard to take him seriously. Even in the more dramatic scenes he seemed really out of place. Rachel Weisz is a great actress but she does just okay here, honestly she doesn’t get a lot to do in the movie. The rest of the cast is mostly just fine, not bad by any means, but nothing above just decent.

We all know that Peter Jackson is a really good director, but his direction of The Lovely Bones is a bit all over the place. Most of the work in the real world sections are filmed fine, if nothing spectacular. The visuals are quite large during the afterlife sequences, but that doesn’t mean they are necessarily good, they were quite over the top. At times it could be cartoonish and really silly. I will say that as glossy and weird looking as the effects are, it is a good looking movie generally.

The Lovely Bones unfortunately isn’t that good and is among Peter Jackson’s worst movies. I can’t comment on whether the book delivered these concepts better but whatever the case, the movie didn’t reach its potential with the ideas. Saoirse Ronan and particularly Stanley Tucci were great, and that might make the movie worth watching. Outside of that there’s really not that much. Watch it if you’re curious about it, but you wouldn’t be missing much if you chose to skip it.

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Speed Racer (2008) Review

Time: 135 Minutes
Age Rating: Violence
Cast:
Emile Hirsch as Speed Racer
Christina Ricci as Trixie
John Goodman as Pops Racer
Susan Sarandon as Mom Racer
Matthew Fox as Racer X
Benno Fürmann as Inspector Detector
Hiroyuki Sanada as Mr. Musha
Rain as Taejo Togokahn
Richard Roundtree as Ben Burns
Director: The Wachowskis

Born into a family business of race cars, Speed Racer (Emile Hirsch) is one of the track’s hot stars. Sitting at the wheel of his Mach 5, he consistently deflates the competition. When Speed turns down an offer from the head of Royalton Industries, he uncovers a secret. Powerful moguls fix the races to boost profits. Hoping to beat the executive, Speed enters the same arduous cross-country race that killed his brother.

The Wachowskis haven’t always been making the best movies in recent years. For every Cloud Atlas they make there’s a Jupiter Ascending. Even though Jupiter Ascending was a really terrible movie (hilariously bad) I don’t actually think it’s their worst movie. That dishonour has to go to Speed Racer, a movie that oddly enough seemed to have been gaining a cult following recently. With its conflicting tone, obnoxious style it was honestly a real pain to sit through. I’m not sure how this movie could end up being this bad with the amount of talented people involved.

I never really found this story interesting at all, not once did it really grab my attention. This film really doesn’t know what it wants to be. On one hand it goes all out crazy with it’s fast and in-your-face style and it’s obnoxious and childish comic relief (which I’ll get to later) but at other times it tries to be serious. I haven’t watched the cartoon it was based on but I have a feeling that it never should have been turned into a live action movie, certain shows don’t translate well to the big screen. This movie is way longer than it needed to be, over 2 hours long, after a while it somehow became boring. The dialogue was most of the time cheesy, the comedy was really bad, but it mostly comes from the comedic relief, which I will go into more later on. So overall the story was uninteresting, the dialogue was cheesy and often terrible, and the comedy was awful.

Most of the actors are fine here, but I have no idea what many of them are actually doing in this movie. Like, what is John Goodman, Christina Ricci and Susan Sarandon doing here? They are way too talented to be in this movie. The acting for the most part is tolerable, so in a sense its really the best part of the movie. With that said, it also has one of the worst parts of the movie, the comic relief, which consists of a kid and a monkey, which are some of the worst comic relief I’ve seen in a movie, they are worse than Kate Capshaw in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Jar Jar Binks from Phantom Menace. That’s saying a lot. They offer absolutely nothing to the movie. They aren’t likable, they aren’t funny, they are obnoxious, there’s absolutely nothing to like about them, yet the film constantly forces them into scenes and dedicates entire scenes to their antics and ‘comedic moments’. I hated them.

I didn’t think the movie would be very good going in but I thought that there would at least good action scenes as the Wachowskis are involved. However that’s not the case, every car action scene looks like a McDonalds toy commercial, not a big budget movie. The way they filmed action wasn’t very entertaining. There were 2 fight scenes, the first was fine but the second was absolutely obnoxious. Even the editing is horrible, during driving (or whatever) there are heads that scroll in front of the screen for no reason. If there’s one thing that really annoyed me about the movie, it’s the style and direction. It was so obnoxious.

I’m of the opinion that Speed Racer is the Wachowski’s worst movie (yes, worse than Jupiter Ascending). The style and editing was obnoxious, the comic relief was irritating, the action scenes were poorly filmed and the film somehow becomes tiring in the worst possible way. The only aspect which didn’t flat out suck was the acting from most of the actors. Aside from that, I have to say that Speed Racer is one of the most painful movies I’ve watched, and that is saying a lot.