And the Award for Most Overrated Goes To....

Rating: 2/10 (1 June 2005)

I'm sure that, by now, some of your friends have hyped Mystic River to Boston and back, gushing about how wonderful and thrilling and exciting this movie is. My suggestion to you would be to delete their numbers from your phone and stop returning their calls. This movie is horrible and that's that. It's incredible to me that anyone would enjoy this boring mess of a film. What's so bad about it? Try everything.
Let's start with the script. Not a single conversation is constructed with believable dialogue. For lines supposedly spoken by middle-class Bostonians, they sure are pretty literary (I'm from Boston, trust me on this one). The movie talks like a daytime soap opera. It's corny and the flat, depressing performances make it even cornier. This would have been fine if the plot had been decent, but alas, this was also too much to ask. The story is supposed to keep you guessing. I was guessing, that is, try to guess when this darn thing would end. What it all adds up to is a script with a million different angles which the writer and director could have fully explored but didn't.
In the way of performances, the cast, for the most part, is absolutely painful to watch (I say "for the most part" because a few of the actors were very good). Most notable among the poor performances was that of the constantly flat Laura Linney. Fortunately, she wasn't on screen very much, but when she was, her blandness stuck out like a sore thumb, even in the presence of other mediocre performances.
So, is there anything good about this movie? Well, yes, but unfortunately, it's not enough to outweigh everything. Even so, I feel a few positive words are deserved, especially by Marcia Gay Harden. Her performance was brilliant and convincing. Every time she appeared on the screen, she shown like a beacon of hope in this wasteland of a film. Also among the good performances was that of Thomas Guiry, although his emotions in the movie seemed unrealistic, but that was clearly the fault of an atrocious screenplay. I feel I should also give a nod to Kevin Chapman, Adam Nelson and Robert Wahlberg who portray Bostonian men quite well. That's about as far as the positives go for this movie.
On the whole, it really is a mess. So, if your friends start singing the praises of this movie, I would think twice about going with them to the cinema.