Painfully Disappointing.

Rating: 1/10 (7 September 2008)

This movie is perhaps one of the worst movies I've seen, and certainly the only one I've rated as a one. And I know awful. I've seen Meet the Feebles and House of the Dead, and this movie didn't measure up to it. It wasn't even the kind of awful that you could laugh at. It wasn't the sappiness of it, I'm a total sap. It was the sheer transparency of the awfulness. The wretched playing of the harmonica during the "touching" one night stand wherein the characters hardly talked, but somehow managed to form a life-long connection was simply stupid. Not just the harmonica, mind you, the whole thing. There were scenes that were okay, but when Evan was playing the neck of the guitar, who was strumming the instrument? Robin Williams delivered his lines with such shallowness, his performance was unbelievable. The dialogue between Lyla and Lori (or whatever her roommate's name was) was so thin and stretched, it caused me physical pain to endure it. For instance, after Lyla had just learned her father had forged her name to put her son up for adoption, and called her friend, who oh-so-sympathetically said: "Pull yourself together!" I don't know a single person who would say that to someone after such a terrible shock. Inane.
Cuba Gooding Jr. and the little girl from the church were probably the only actors in the movie who managed to give their character's life, rather than relinquishing themselves to being caricatures of absurdity. Jonathan Rhys Meyers did an okay job, but his hotness could have been blinding me.
As someone who has always been accused of being a dreamer and having my head in the clouds, this movie is less about dreamers than about those seeking an escape. It makes a travesty of the hard work musicians put into their art by insinuating that if you "follow the music" and saw the physics behind it all, you too could be an August Rush. Don't even get me started on the sheer stupidity of his being able to pick up music theory after only being shown the basic notes on the piano.
I found the movie offensive.