Writer: Ezekiel Lee Zhiang Yang

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Watch this if you liked: “What Dreams May Come”, “Mystic River”

Based on the best-selling 2002 Alice Sebold novel, "The Lovely Bones" is Peter Jackson's personal project (he went out of his way to buy the rights) that must have been a powerful read but as a movie, it comes off as scarcely more than a colourful watch.

If you've read how disgusted critic Roger Ebert was of this film because it suggests how a brutally murdered teen girl is better off in a watercolour "heaven" and how "the afterlife resembles a happy gathering of Facebook friends", then you'd probably be inclined to agree with him. Unlike the decidedly dark but nevertheless similar "What Dreams May Come" in which Robin Williams enters a metaphysical, watercolour hell to save his dead spouse, this drama seems to take death a little too lightly and the cheesy CGI captures little else than the imagination of a moody 16-year-old's suicide poems.

What's it about, you ask? 14-year-old Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan) narrates to us from the grave (or hell, or heaven, whichever you fancy) about how she has died at the hands of a serial child killer (Stanley Tucci) and how life on Earth is moving along with her grieving parents (Mark Wahlberg, Rachel Weisz) who are at odds with each other on how to cope with the sudden loss. There are vital events in the book that are completely left out for this adaptation but the movie as a whole is already thematically unimpressive.

Perhaps the best selling point of the whole show is the cast. None could be faulted for their solid turns, with special mention going out to the baddie played by Stanley Tucci, who has correspondingly received an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor. So despicable was his portrayal that you can read about the movie's ending was changed because a test audience wanted the perpetrator to suffer more pain!

Most of the negative reviews for this film have placed the fault squarely on Peter Jackson, dismissing it as a movie that shouldn't have been made in the first place. More forgiving audiences will still find this a worthwhile effort with a strong finish, considering it still comes off as a sincere attempt by a person who admires the source material.

Cinema Online, 01 March 2010