6/10

Rating: 6/10 (17 October 2014)

Quirky, light-hearted and simplistic to a fault, despite screaming to be likable and sweat the movie ends up being a light mess that had me actually a little angry when I thought back about it. All the mistakes it mad were easily avoidable, but it fell into them and became an average romantic film, instead of being something particular.
For every positive point I think about "Begin Again" a negative immediately takes its place and even though it isn't what I wanted because I really wanted to like this movie, that's the way it went down. I have to point out that despite all the flaws I'll list ahead I had a kind of good time, especially because of the music that had really high production value and quality and surely because of the comedic aspects of the film; it definitely had success in making me laugh. So, the film starts out fairly strong, it never ever had me hooked or really interested in any of the characters, but the first and first-half of the second acts had a really good flow to them. Unfortunately after the movie hits a little over mid-way point is simply starts to crumble down piece by piece and gets what could have been a 7.5 to a 6. It becomes overly sentimental and messy, but moreover the more the film goes on the more it approaches the world in a totally surreal way and keeps trivializing reality with a light-heartiness that became annoying. Most importantly, "Begin Again" is a total failure in fact of clichés. It chooses to avoid the one that could have worked and uses the totally wrong and out of context ones.
Now to the cast: the first thought that came to mind when I read the cast list was "wow, impressive" and they certainly are and all used in good ways, no one has highlights but no one has weaknesses and they all contribute to th . Except for one. Many have talked about the two leads' chemistry. Whist I may mildly agree that they work together well I thought that Keira Knightly was totally miss-cast. I am not a Knightly hater, I actually think she really has some acting chops, but from frame one of this movie I never bought her as her character until the end. It's not really because of her performance, which isn't anyway extraordinary, but I really didn't see her fit in this role. On the contrary Mark Ruffalo was very good and worked really well, even if the material wasn't top notch.
I think this could have been a much better movie, but still it had its moments and fun.