Pretty but Pointless

Rating: 5/10 (8 June 2013)

After his ship is hit by a storm, a young Indian man finds himself adrift on a boat with a tiger. The cinematography is so dazzling that Lee won an Oscar for this, one of the few instances where a director has won without the film winning Best Picture. Unfortunately, Lee is better with the special effects than with the actors, whose performances are uneven at best. While the movie looks great, like pretty postcards, the script, based on a popular novel, is too weak to sustain interest. The story, disjointed and somewhat clumsily structured with flashbacks, is fantastic and nonsensical, and ultimately pointless. The characters are meant to be wise and worldly but come across as shallow caricatures.