Review of Charlie St. Cloud (2010) by Shiira — 11 Aug 2010

Charlie(Zac Efron) sees dead people, but he's not dead, technically. As the surviving brother of a fiery car accident, the film oversells the point of Charlie being dead inside by having him kill time in a graveyard.

Yes, we get it. Time can stand still for the living, too; the living dead, like the caretaker, a selective clairvoyant who only sees dead loved ones. Played by Zac Efron, the star of "High School Musical", to everybody's surprise, didn't fare badly last year in Richard Linklater's "Me and Orson Welles", as he ingratiated himself admirably within an ensemble cast.

But does he have the stuff that lead actors are made of? Like any young enterprising former teen star, Efron doesn't want to be singing showtunes in "High School Musical 37"(an old teen like Jeff Conaway in "Grease"), but the actor in transition plays it safe this time around in "Charlie St.

Cloud", catering to his female devotees by remaining, against all probability, flawlessly handsome, since the car he was driving performed a couple of rolls on the highway. At Sam's funeral, Charlie, for the sake of versimilitude, should be in a wheelchair, or at the very least, have his arm in a sling.

In other words, sport some evidence of having been involved in a vehicular crash. Poor Efron has to communicate emotional pain and inner turmoil with an unblemished face and undamaged body. A band-aid on his nose couldn't hurt.

Johnny Depp, who once donned scissorhands and a face full of crosshatching scars to distance himself from the sex symbol status he attained from "21 Jump Street", would have insisted on that band-aid(a la Jack Nicholson in Roman Polanski's "Chinatown"), for starters.

Depp treated his face like a curse. Efron won't go anywhere until he eschews vanity, and plays "ugly". Not only physically, but emotionally, as well. The moviegoer waits for the moment when Charlie tells Sam(Charlie Tahan) that he'll never be a starting pitcher for the Red Sox, an emotional climax to the utter futility of practice, but the moment never comes.

As it turns out, it's Charlie who holds Sam back, even though the younger St. Cloud whines all throughout the movie about remaining loyal to their pact. "Charlie St. Cloud" is a lot darker than it lets on, but thanks to the film's unabashedly Christian underpinning, its good-naturedness and oversentimentality negates any real fallout(drugs and alcohol) from materializing.

If "Charlie St. Cloud" went there, would Efron have the acting chops to follow? "Charlie St. Cloud" never captures the tragedy of wasted potential because the moviegoer can't truly feel sorry for somebody who looks like an underwear model.