Movie Review: Charlie St. Cloud

Zac Efron, get your agent on the phone. He just can’t seem to catch you a break or at least find some consistency.

After proving himself to be the absolute least annoying thing to come from the blasé and repetitive High School Musical trilogy, Efron seems to be having a rough time finding his footing. While the teen female demographic only wants to hear him sing or see him strut around with his shirt off, the rest of us don’t mind him at all in anything else. While his new venture may seem to think that dumber is better, he’s the only thing watchable in Charlie St. Cloud.

When he was cast as the teenage version of Matthew Perry in 17 Again, he was up for the high school shenanigans and proved a good pairing to costar Thomas Lennon. Returning to work with 17 Again director Burr Steers, even the trailers can’t prepare you for the startling revelations of idiocy that abound here. Working with such an incohesive and moronic script that meanders from wearing its heart on its sleeve to bashing the audience over the head to make them cry, it’s not surprising that the script comes from two writers with very different oeuvres.

First you have screenwriter Craig Pearce who has only the classics Moulin Rouge!, Romeo + Juliet, and Strictly Ballroom on his resumé. Next you have the weeping willow department of cowriter Lewis Colick who’s brought us such offerings as Ladder 49, October Sky, Ghosts of Mississippi, and The Dirt Bike Kid. It almost makes you wonder if Pearce’s original screenplay wasn’t sappy enough to fit the British Columbian filming locations and the studio brought in Colick to “flesh out” the heartache of Ben Sherwood’s novel, The Death and Life of Charlie St. Cloud, to make the wombs in the room throb as the genre demands.

Charlie St. Cloud (Efron) certainly has everything going for him. He’s just been handed a Stanford scholarship and while fresh out of high school he still finds time to be father figure to his younger brother Sam (Charlie Tahan) while their single mother (Kim Basinger) is off working double shifts and is one of the best yachters in the region. But all that goes sour when Charlie tries to sneak out to a kegger and gets caught by Sam who demands to be driven to a friend’s house to watch the end of a Boston Red Sox game. On this fateful journey the two are in a traffic accident and Charlie winds up being brought back to life by paramedic Florio Ferrente (Ray Liotta).

Article Author: Cinenerd

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