Review: The Lovely Bones

Review: The Lovely Bones

Rating: *1/2

Nonna's Rating: $

Rotten Tomatoes: 37%

I had high hopes for this movie. I was moved by the book and thought Peter Jackson would be able to handle its translation to film. I was wrong. What a mess! A child is brutally murdered. A family is ripped apart. The murderer has designs on another child in the family. Yet, these emotion-fraught situations seem to generate little heat in the film. Perhaps, in part because they are interspersed with scenes of the dead child observing her family's struggles from a strangely vapid purgatorial place. (If it is the anteroom to heaven, let's hope heaven is a vast improvement.) The book is an eloquent exploration of grief. In all fairness, probably not that easy to translate to film. As one critic said, "Some books should stay between their covers."

Nonna's Ratings:

$$$$ = Worth paying the Friday evening price
$$$= Worth paying the Matinee price
$$= Worth a rental
$ = Wait for cable
# = Skip it