Over-hyped cliché

Rating: 1/10 (23 August 2010)

Stopped watching halfway through (in the "happy" phase when Bad Blake goes ballooning with cute little 4-year-old) because it was simply too sappy and cliché-ridden to watch.
Jeff Bridges obviously can do drunk and yes he can smoke like a chimney, but it must have been a weak field for him to walk away with an Oscar for this performance. The real shortcoming is the script, however, which takes a dull, trite story and magnifies, if possible, its dullness and triteness.
Perhaps the weakest point of the script is the lame, lame single mom played by Maggie Gyllenhall (the irony that she should get an Academy Award nomination for her worst role ever). The script never establishes a basis for her motivation, and the director seems to want to imbue a hopeless script with some life by turning her into coy, then bursting into tears because Bad Blake will never remember her. There is zero sexual tension between Gyllenhall and Bridges (Gyllenhall is too old for the part anyway, but the gap in their ages makes it all faintly ridiculous).
Colin Farrell almost steals the show by giving a nuanced performance of a performer with genuine respect for his mentor but ruthless in his goal of keeping top billing. But even he cannot escape the clichés of the script.
I didn't see this in the theater because I found the trailer off-putting -- it looked like a completely predictable rehash of an incredibly trite story. After the Oscar buzz, took a chance on renting it, but found that the trailer accurately portrayed the complete lack on inspiration in this story.