Very disappointing

Rating: 4/10 (17 July 2017)

Mystic River starts off strong enough. It's dated, but engaging, and benefits from great performances from Tim Robbins and Sean Penn. It contains some high-quality scenes, but as a whole, it's very disappointing, mostly due to the fact that it has one of the worst endings I've ever seen. The ending is so bad, it ruins the entire movie, which is a shame when you consider how much better the movie could have been with just a few key changes (mostly to the third act). Toward the end of the movie, one of the most likable characters is killed off unnecessarily. His murder is deeply dissatisfying, and everything about it, including the aftermath (in other words, the rest of the movie), which the writers also flubbed, feels like it belongs in an inferior draft of a much better screenplay. The ending is not just dissatisfying, it's disgusting. Jimmy's wife, Annabeth, is a repulsive human being, and the final scene with her is nauseating. Mystic River ends on a horrible note. Of the movie's two tragic murders, one is shrugged off, and the other is not only defended by the perpetrator's own wife, but not investigated by a character who is a police officer! (He doesn't arrest the culprit, either, despite the fact that the perp more or less confessed to the crime). And then we're expected to give a sh*t when the police officer's wife decides to come home? Such a reunion seems trivial during the aftermath of the ruthless murder of a major character, whose death, I might add, was not grieved by a single character, and was almost entirely glossed over. But even disregarding the two murders, or at least the more recent one, I had zero emotional investment in the police officer at this point, anyway, and can't imagine other viewers having much more. Come to think of it, I cannot recall a single point in the movie where Kevin Bacon's character did anything that might arouse the slightest bit of sympathy in the audience. Yet, by the end of the movie, more focus is given to this minor subplot to do with his wife and to a random parade than to the overarching plot of the movie! Mystic River had the potential to be an excellent crime drama, but it squanders the talent of its leads to create a movie that is extremely unpleasant, incredibly frustrating, and vastly overrated.