Indefensible

Rating: 1/10 (18 April 2005)

This film has gone straight to the top of my "worst films of all time" list. There is nothing positive to be said about it. Whoever's responsible for it should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves.
The plot is this: Jamie is the school saint: a hard-working charitable Christian girl, who gets bullied for her troubles, and has no friends but is nevertheless perfect. (The "ugly-duckling" side to her character requires a major suspension of belief, since she's played by celebrity pop-singer Mandy Moore. But I'll let that pass, since there are far more serious criticisms to make.) Landon on the other hand is a loud-mouthed, popular, and irresponsible jock. Through his friendship with Jamie however, he gradually and agonisingly becomes a reformed character. Now that's a turgid, predictable, and unsubtle morality tale if ever I heard one. In case you missed it, the moral is this: being good is good, and being bad is bad. Even worse, it's Christian propaganda of the most patronising kind: being "good" in this film pretty much equals being Christian.
Then the plot takes a tragic turn: Jamie is fatally ill. Eventually after bravely coming to terms with her illness through her faith, she dies. Shortly before she dies however, Landon proposes to her. Their tragic, saccharine wedding is one of the most despicable scenes in the history of cinema.
The script throughout is simply appalling: it's nothing but a string of clichÃ©s of the most unoriginal and puke-makingly sentimental kind. Anyone for the line "Daddy, I love you *so* much"? As mawkish unimaginative cr*p goes that's bad enough already, but when it's spoken by a beautiful teenage girl on her deathbed, it becomes entirely intolerable.
One of the many major problems of this film is the performance of Jamie by pop-starlet Mandy Moore. In a nut-shell, Mandy Moore can't act. This is not a matter of opinion, it's a straightforward observation. Her efforts at acting are embarrassing. The fact that she was cast in this role can have been nothing more than a PR move to sell DVDs by association with her name. It should be interpreted as a direct insult to the intelligence of the viewer.
To compound the insult, the viewer then has put up with Ms Moore singing a couple of songs. In truth her songs perfectly capture the spirit of the whole film: unforgivable, unbearable emotional syrup.
What makes this film so bad, what makes it such terrible, unwatchable bilge, is its humourlessness. It's is set in a high-school and was described (by someone at "Sugar" magazine who should be sacked) as "The Teen Film of the Year". You might therefore expect it to contain a smattering of laughs, or at least attempted laughs. You say "romantic...", I say "...comedy", right? But no: throughout the whole length of this film, there isn't a single joke, or funny moment. Now I wouldn't expect the team responsible for this mush to be capable of actually making me laugh, but they could at least try. They could at least lighten the atmosphere occasionally. But they don't. The whole thing is given an insufferably heavy-handed, po-faced treatment, presumably to give the illusion that some important lesson about life is being taught. Well it isn't. The only lesson I took away with me is that some people shouldn't be allowed to make films.
In fairness, I should admit that I knew that I would hate this film before I watched it, and that I only did so because my girlfriend insisted on it. However my expectations were surpassed by miles, and as it turned out, my girlfriend also hated it (which serves her right). If you like having boring obvious moral lessons bludgeoned into you skull, then you might enjoy this film. If you like romance to be sickly sweet and tragedy to be angst-ridden, drawn-out, unsubtle, and tortuous then you'll love it. If you like trite, kitsch, commercial nonsense posing as a serious heartfelt love-story, then go and see it. But I don't and I got thoroughly fed up with the script continually plumbing new depths in its doomed attempts to tear my heart-strings.
This is not just an unspeakably bad film, its also a cynical film. It was made with minimal effort and with no regard for artistic creativity to promote Christianity and to make money by conning kids who don't know any better: shameful.