wrong tone, wrong story, wrong actor, nothing to do with reality...

Rating: 1/10 (12 June 2006)

This was an awful movie, I disliked every minute of it. A story based on a string of bizarre coincidences which say very little about human nature - nothing we don't already know - makes a weak movie. Not only that - the movie is slow, actors clumsily move forward in a complicated script, which loses its credibility entirely after 30 to 50 minutes, when the exaggerated focus on the obvious weakest link in the story - it could have been a little mote subtle - begins to be counterproductive.
But then again, Eastwood's films, as much as I like many of them, have always dealt with straightforward themes, simple lines, easy plots, ordinary people - maybe even simple people. They are films for the average American, everybody has got to understand them. The same goes for Mystic River.
Mystic River is about vengeance and justice and the latter has always a relative phenomenon in Eastwoods movies. But immorality has not been a steady subject in his films, and so the end proved rather surprising, it being much closer to the simplistic view on life belonging to Mr. Penn, who might be a talented actor, but fails miserably as a compassionate human being. It makes Mystic River a bad B-movie.