A total disappointment, waaaaaaay over rated. Save your money

Rating: 5/10 (18 October 2003)

I was looking forward to this movie. There was so much hype about it, and after reading the book which I considered to be a very good story line that was not well written I figured that it could play really well as a movie. Boy was I ever wrong. For starters, with the exception of Tim Robbins performance which is very good, the rest of the performances are quite mediocre, the worst being Marcia Gay Harding's. You can't believe how bad it goes on the 'vampires' scene you hardly can contain your laughter, and last but not least Laura Linney who thinks that Bostonians speak like southerners????????? What's up with that ! The score is another flaw in the movie it rises to angelic heights at the worst of times and there are some blues tunes courtesy of Kyle Eastwood that should only be played when teaching how-NOT-to play the blues. On top of it, the real reason for why the girl is murdered, which I will give at the end as a spoiler, is changed in the movie to something completely bogus. Why they would do that is beyond me but it completely devalues the whole story. This is a long novel and a long movie, yet the flow of the story is just off, I don't know why and how but you'll know what i mean if you watch it. Folks, anyone that is giving this movie a rating higher than 7 must be caught in the last 5 year trend of media smooching towards Clint Eastwood films. This movie is just dull. 5/10...and I am being generous.
SPOILER AHEAD
The reason the girl is murder is because the young mute brother does not want his older brother to leave, since his brother is planning to marry the girl and leave, he kills her to keep the brother at home. In the movie the murder is attributed to an accidental shooting and the stealing of a car, which plays out as such a lame excuse that you have to contain yourself from throwing crap at the screen. Is this PC towards mute people, who the hell knows, but it just makes the whole story line so freaking lame.