Charlie St. Cloud Review: A young teenager's younger brother is killed in a car accident and when running away from his funeral, he finds his brother’s ghost and they play catch. But of course, Charlie (Efron) meets a girl and now he has to choose between the girl and the stupid kid. Amazingly terrible story that makes no logical sense what so ever. Put a lot of effort into making us think and feel that his younger brother was a ghost. Not. It was just awful acting to and it was really over-done and over-rated. I don't know what this film was trying to achieve but it’s just going to go down from here. Charlie St. Cloud is terrible! Do not see, you will have wasted your money!
It's entirely possible that Zac Efron can really act. We may never know. He always plays the same character: a good-looking, sensitive, semi-credibly athletic, Boy Scouty high-school kid with Clairol-model floppy hair. He could do it in his sleep. He could do it on speed. He could do it on Ritalin. He may be able to do it after he's dead, and they just prop him up and let his corpse go through the motions!
Efron will never have a career as great as Brad Pitt’s and although he already has been booked for several movies, his career is already in danger. Very bad actors, as Bruce Willis is, have had a great career only because they are very good at choosing what to do. Orlando Bloom destroyed his career acting in "Elisabethville" with Kirsten Dunst. Dunst and Bloom are actors without personality and started their careers just being in Blockbuster Movies (Lord of the Rings and Pirates of the Caribbean (Bloom) & Spiderman (Dunst). Now they have been already burned while acting in Elisabethville, whose destiny was an obvious flop from the beginning. Jennifer Aniston is a star because she has been in Friends and married and lost Brad Pitt, becoming a constant presence in gossip magazine, but her movies don't cash, why? Because they are ugly and she is not able to choose the good ones.
Now on the movie itself; first, Efron's character talks to dead people. I was like "What the heck? He needs to go to a psychiatric institute!" It is not believable. And the punch of the story is just ridiculous. At the end, I was still thinking that Efron's character needed to go to an institute. And for good. And the whole story is based on a relationship that we do not even know well. The brotherhood between Charlie and his brother did not seem that strong... Nothing works in this movie. The whole story sucks. That was the problem. I don't even want to read the book, life is too short. I was very disappointed and after seeing this movie, I was like "I should have seen Inception for a second time. At least this film is more realistic." It gives you an idea.
Ray Liotta (one of my favorite actors of all time) has a tiny, tiny part which should have been developed much more fully. Kim Basinger is totally forgettable. Efron's love interest, Amanda Crew, is very hard to like. The film hardly explores her character and I found myself responding to her supposedly dramatic scenes very negatively. The young actor who plays Sam does an okay job. He tries to be the awe-struck younger brother but Efron doesn't give him enough to work with.
There are a few additional wrinkles that you can pick up by actually sitting through the whole movie. One is that this game of catch has been going on for an hour a day for over 1800 days now, and even after all that time neither kid can throw a baseball worth a damn. Another tidbit is that Charlie is able to talk to other dead people besides Sam. Also, he's artistic. And really, really sensitive. (Did I mention that already?)
The only good thing in this film? The song "Airplanes" in the trailer. That's all.
So that leaves us with the only real dilemma posed by this low-wattage would-be tear- jerker: mawkish or maudlin, mawkish or maudlin?
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