a low point for all involved

Rating: Null/10 (20 November 2003)

Wow. I have to agree with the others here who commented about how overrated this film is. I'm a huge Clint fan, both as an actor and especially as a director. In his own way he's an American auteur. Unfortunately Mystic River is one of his weakest movies ever.
**Spoilers**
Not only is it painfully slow, but it's painfully cliched. Events are telegraphed miles in advance. Some of the dialogue is awful. Tim Robbins (the best thing in this movie) going on about "I had to split my personality into somebody else so I could deal with the abuse" is a great example of bad dialogue. The wonderful Marcia Gay Harden plays her role like a bug-eyed looney from a 1930s Universal horror film. If the usually incredible Sean Penn cried one more time I would have puked. And this is one of those movies that so obviously sets up a killer that you know it can't be that character, and then in the last ten minutes the real killer is discovered. But I have one last complaint. Clint should stick to directing and give up composing. The music is treacle. The crescendo blast of music at the end when a gun is shot and the screen cuts to a bright sunny day was too much. He should stick with Lennie Niehaus.
This is similar in many ways to Blood Work and True Crime, where some of the acting is way over the top cliched, and some of the plot twists come either too late or out of left field. Clint is a wonderful director, but like Woody Allen he's been in a slump lately. Let's hope they both recover soon.