Contrived

Rating: Null/10 (29 December 2014)

The thread for St Vincent reminded me I'd seen this on Saturday. So, why should I care about these characters? Most of them aren't well-developed, and even when they were, the film's following a clearly defined formula that nothing has any emotional impact because it feels exactly like a movie. There needs to be something grounded in reality for me to feel something, but there's none of that in here. Being grounded in reality doesn't mean not having magic, or fantasy, or supernatural etc, because any type of genre film could be created with some real sense of emotion. But every emotion the characters feel here are so clearly created for an audience to feel something that the complete contrivance of every moment feels like exactly that, a contrivance. There's absolutely nothing realistic here. Some of the situations that the characters find themselves here are things that could hypothetically happen in someone's life, no matter how cheesy... but the film failing to come across as anything other than a schmaltzy, overly-forced sentimental piece of fiction is really the only reason it fails, and a big enough reason to. Exactly the type of dreck I try to stay away from, and usually do until I'm with friends who won't see anything else like in this case.
However, none of the actors are really at fault. Andrew Lincoln is super adorable and perfect here, and for the cast I can't say it totally fails