By Chris Tookey
Last updated at 12:41 AM on 28th January 2011
Verdict: A fate only slightly preferable to death
Rating: Turkey
Last week, Oscar-winning director Ron Howard came a cropper with The Dilemma, while veterans Harrison Ford and Diane Keaton looked like strangers to comedy in Morning Glory.
This week, it’s the turn of Clint Eastwood and Peter Morgan (the writer of The Queen), who turn out to be collaborators from hell on the bore-a-thon Hereafter.
This is a bewilderingly pointless drama, weaving together three dreary stories about mortality and the afterlife. It’s certainly evocative of a near-death experience, but not in the way intended. Matt Damon plays a psychic troubled by his ability to pass on messages from the dead to the living.
A lesson in awful: Matt Damon and Cecile de France are deeply uninteresting
His turmoil, so poorly played that it is indistinguishable from smugness, poisons his relationship with a woman he meets at an evening class. Though supposed to be attractive, she’s overplayed so atrociously by Bryce Dallas Howard that she comes across as a demented pixie.
Meanwhile, a French TV presenter (Cecile de France) nearly dies in a tsunami — the one effective sequence in the movie — and keeps having flashbacks to an afterlife.
This deeply uninteresting revelation causes her to write a book and sacrifice both her lover and her career. I think we’re meant to find this brave, but it mostly made me wonder how she found a publisher.
A poor start: George McLaren and his brother Frankie star in this abject failure of a film
Finally, a London schoolboy (George McLaren) loses his twin brother in a road accident, but becomes aware that a hand from beyond the grave is helping him to cheat death — though not, unfortunately, endowing him with the ability to deliver lines as though he knows their meaning.
The big problem with Hereafter is that neither Morgan nor Eastwood has anything even slightly interesting to say about the afterlife.
The characters are, at best, tedious. Their stories are sluggish. The whole thing’s presumably intended to be profound and spiritual. I’m afraid the reality is that it’s depressing, pretentious dopiness on an epic scale, as though 80-year-old Clint has suddenly become possessed by the befuddled spirit of M. Night Shyamalan.
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