Review of Charlie St. Cloud (2010) by Philip C — 20 Dec 2010

To sum it up in one word I think I would choose "meh". Just so we're clear, I've never read the book so I have no idea whether it's accurate or not to its original source material.

I'll start off with the good parts and end with the bad. Well Amanda Crew almost made up for it with her hotness, almost...well that's about all that's good in it. Nah I'm just kidding, there's more to it than that, but seriously, Amanda Crew is smoking hot (and Canadian so BONUS!).

Zac Efron tries to move out of his comfort zone here and does reasonably well playing an "angry/pissed off/morose teenager" (wait, that sounds like every teenager...at some point at least). After the accidental death of his brother, and as five years pass Efron takes up custodial duties in the local cemetery.

While the film does have a "Five Years Later" flash by to speed up time, the beginning of the film feels a tad slow but does pick up once the "initial incident" has taken place. As far as acting goes, it's pretty good with the aforementioned Crew and Efron, Kim Basinger shows up as his mom (still looking hot as ever.

..) but is only in the film for a very short amount of time. Now I know it's based off a book so it's not like they could just add more scenes with her (oh wait, they do that all the time in book-to-film adaptations anyway).

It's basically similar with Ray Liota, he's a great actor with far too little screentime. Charlie Tahan plays Effron's younger brother and does far better than I thought he would, from the trailers I wasn't expecting much but he did pleasantly surprise.

Now for all of the negative points. As a film, Charlie St. Cloud is "meh" for several reasons. The story is an intriguing one, but the writing was more often than not laughable, at times embarrassing and overly cheesy.

Now I for one enjoy good love stories (The Notebook, 500 Days of Summer, A Walk To Remember) when they're done right. I just couldn't help but feel that it was so cheesy the whole time, that it was far too overwhelming to bare at times.

The plot twist was decent but I felt that it was delivered far too late in the film to be really impactful, a little earlier on I think would have helped. As well there was some truly atrocious greenscreen that was used, a little embarrasing for being a 2010 picture, not to mention it completely took me out of the film at times because it was so poorly done.

It looked like it came from something done in 2002 (being dated is never a good thing). So basically: the acting is good, Amanda Crew is hot, the writing is poorly done and overly cheesy, Kim Basinger is still hot, Ray Liotta is underused, Zac Effron gives a respectable performance and the greenscreen is crap.