Review of If I Stay (2014) by Diego T — 26 Nov 2014

There's a strange trend going around right now that needs addressing: Why are teen movies romanticizing the worst and most uncomfortable aspects of life? Twilight was basically an abusive relationship between an easily manipulated girl and her creepy stalker boyfriend, but it was passed off to audiences as "beautiful teen love." It was the same in The Lovely Bones, The Host, and now If I Stay, a movie about a girl who becomes comatose after her family dies, and is then forced to choose between willfully dying and not going towards the light. Excellent romantic material right here, to be sure. Some of the blame lands on the writers, to be sure, but they wouldn't pump out such drivel if they didn't have an audience.

I'm going to be honest. I had absolutely no hope that this film was going to be any good, and it met every single one of my negative expectations. Still, I'm going to do my best to write this review without going completely off the rails. So here we go: If I Stay is a 2014 film directed by R.J. Cutler (lol) and starring Chloe Grace-Moretz as Mia, a teenage girl trying to get into Julliard while also doing her best to hold onto her boyfriend. This film follows two parallel stories-- Mia's life before her car accident, and her out-of-body experience in the hospital during the aftermath. With these basic facts, this movie is already painfully close to the abomination known as The Lovely Bones, in which a young girl is murdered by a psychopath and then goes off to an overly-rendered CGI heaven. If I Stay isn't quite as grating. But it's still damn awful.

Grace-Moretz is not an actress. This has become painfully apparent after her performances in numerous high-profile roles, from Martin Scorsese films to comic book movies. However, it's not for lack of trying, and she truly gives it her all in If I Stay. Sadly, that's not good enough, and she comes across as another generically enthusiastic romantic lead in a teen movie. Mia leads a ridiculously charmed life, so when the car accident happens, it causes a drastic tonal shift that makes the film's two halves clash awkwardly with one another. Besides, the crash itself is just a plot device to make us feel bad for Mia. There was no way to sympathize with her beforehand ("How sad, this privileged white girl has to choose between her handsome and witty boyfriend and her prodigious career as a cellist! Oh, the humanity!"), so the movie was constructed around a completely bogus plot contrivance in order to give her some actual hardships to overcome. Sorry, I'm not going to buy into it.

The film also relies heavily on the question of whether or not Mia will fight hard enough to live, which makes her character even less relatable. If this film were about a child in Syria who was in critical condition in a hospital being shelled by rebel forces, I'd at least be able to see a plausible reason for the character to not want to go on living. But Moretz's character has everything going for her, and the fact that she doesn't appreciate that makes her very cold to audiences. There is no human touch to this character, and since the entire movie is built around her, there's no way to make a connection with the film in general. The supporting performances are even blander and more unmoving than hers, and it often feels as if the film was cast with the understudies from other melodramatic young adult movies. Overall there's very little effort put into this film.

There are far more flaws outside the acting, however. This is not a very cohesively made movie, and sometimes gives the impression that two different scripts were thrown together to create it, resulting in this hamfisted and cheesy mess. It's also a two-hour movie that could easily have been shaved down to the length of a short film, if anyone involved in its creation cared about pacing. The final product is long and drawn out, with several scenes that could have been cut and others still that could have been edited heavily. There are repetitive scenes of Mia and her one-dimensional boyfriend going on dates, and then her inevitably complaining about how she "doesn't belong" or "hasn't found her people." Things like these tell us nothing about the character other than the fact that she's a normal teenager. Which is really the main problem with movies like this: They seem to think that the only character development needed is "typical teenage girl," nothing more and nothing less. After all, it's worked in the past, and undemanding teen audiences have demonstrated overwhelmingly that they're willing to settle for flat, lazy characterization, as long as the character in question has the same vague complaints about life that they do.

Final Score for If I Stay: 2/10 stars. This is the kind of movie that's so exhaustingly bland that you can't help but hate it. Nothing about this trite and unconvincing exercise in supernatural romance is even remotely interesting or engaging. The acting is terrible, the direction is almost equally bad, and the entire affair reeks of manipulative trite. Even the story is formulaic-- Another teenager who's mildly dissatisfied with her life? What else is new? At least the movie understands how indescribably boring this is and attempts to take it in another direction, but it does so in the worst way possible; with an out-of-body experience. At this point, If I Stay works more as an unintentional comedy than anything else, and I wholeheartedly endorse a drinking game constructed around the number of times Mia yells "No!" But all dramatic elements of this film were lost on me, and will be similarly lost on any viewer who takes a moment to think before blindly swallowing this incomprehensible claptrap.