Charlie St Cloud
Review
by Anthony Morris
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Charlie St Cloud
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If you saw Scott Pilgrim vs The World, then you saw the trailer for Charlie St Cloud - and if you didn't see Scott Pilgrim vs The World, what's wrong with you?
However,
if you did see the truly cheesy trailer, you already know roughly
60% of the story : Zack Efron is Charlie St Cloud, a young man from a
small seaside town with a bright future ahead of him right up until the
second his (kind of annoying) young brother dies in a car crash.
Jump
ahead five years and Charlie is now the groundskeeper at the local
graveyard, unable to leave town for even a single day thanks to a
promise he made to his dead brother to practice baseball with him every
day at sundown in the local woods.
Unfortunately the ghost of
his dead brother isn't evil and St Cloud isn't incapable of escape : he
just wants to hang out with his dead brother and to hell with
everything else (including, in a surprisingly funny scene, the all-girl
staff at the local toy shop).
As set-ups go this one sounds
like a mildly interesting metaphor for grief holding someone back, but
no : Charlie can actually see other ghosts too, as having survived the
car crash that killed his brother somehow gave him the ability to see
dead people.
A love story comes into play as the film
progresses, and there are a couple of mildly interesting twists, but
it's all kind of obvious and basic, even if Efron does do a decent job
of being grief-stricken without being annoying.
This is grief porn for teens; everyone else will just grieve for the time they wasted here. 2.5 out
of 5
Charlie St Cloud
Australian release: 23rd September,
2010
Official
Site: Charlie St Cloud
Cast: Zac Efron, Amanda Crew, Ray Liotta, Kim Basinger, Chris Massoglia, Dave Franco
Director: Burr Steers
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