Director: Burr Steers
Genre: Drama, Fantasy, Romance
Rating: C
I suspect that I enjoyed Charlie
St. Cloud far more than I should have.
Which is a lesson learned; when watching bad movies, it is recommended
that one do so in the company of friends who will thoroughly make fun of it
with you.
The plot of the movie is very straightforward and rather clichéd;
think of it as a more predictable, romantically inclined The Sixth Sense. Actually,
no, to say that is a bit of an insult to The
Sixth Sense. Rather, Charlie St. Cloud is more like The Invisible, but with a happier
ending. If you’ve never seen The Invisible, don’t, it wasn’t
good. But, back to Charlie. In this film we
have the eponymous character, Charlie St. Cloud (Efron), a recent high school
graduate and prospective Stanford University student who is an amazing
sailor. One day he and his younger
brother Sam (Tahan) are in a car accident; Charlie is revived by a paramedic (Lolita),
but Sam dies. Not all is lost, however,
as before his brother’s death Charlie promises to never leave him, and thus
after his death Sam is able to appear and the two practice baseball every day
at sunset. Five years later, after Charlie
has effectively given up his life in order to stay with his dead brother,
Charlie re-meets Tess Carroll (Crew), a girl he went to school with and a
fellow sailor. They bond and slowly fall
in love, but it isn’t all what it seems.
Eventually, Charlie must choose between his dead brother and this new
love.
There is a bit more to it, but I’m refraining from expanding so as to
not spoil. The plot, however, is ridiculously
obvious, with the foreshadowing being dropped as heavily handed as an piano
falling from an upper floor of a tall building.
Just where they were planning on going with the plot was rather obvious,
so much so that the friends I was watching this film with and I were trying to
predict the ending at most half way through it.
We weren’t exactly right, but at the same time we were pretty
close. The ridiculing that we gave the
movie was probably the best part of it itself, as was the commentary on the similarities
between Charlie St. Cloud and Logan Thibault of The Lucky One. The one thing
that Charlie St. Cloud does have
going for it is the beautiful backdrop; but then, as it was filmed in the
Vancouver area, I’m somewhat biased.
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