Directed by William Maher
Released March 14, 2008
I was completely unprepared for what this movie would be after looking at the DVD cover and presuming it would be a fantasy-filled wonder of an artistic film. Instead, it is an entirely generic broken family drama with falls far below the par. The setup is rushed and the film feels like it’s already midway through right at the beginning. It simply never gets off the ground, and the result is a painstakingly slow, unimaginative drawl. Charlize Theron does a decent enough job in a brief performance, as does Dennis Hopper. Their characters, however, are hardly developed enough to be fully engaging. Nick Stahl is especially disappointing, as he is an actor who is able to successfully deal with underwhelming material (“Terminator 3”, “Carnivale”), but his performance here falls flat. The true revelation is fifteen-year-old AnnaSophia Robb, who does a terrific job embodying the role of a girl far too mature for her age stuck in this unfortunate situation. There is a scene or two midway through the movie which provides a brief glimpse into what the movie could have been if it had attempted more to allow Robb’s character to lose herself in a fantasy world where all her problems were gone, but the movie as a whole is hopeless to recover any element of originality.
F
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