Painfully smug.

Rating: 5/10 (24 January 2015)

Now when a film tells you it's more honest than other films you can tell it's full of crap. Just because it has a morbid premise doesn't make it anymore real than the rest of the teenage melodrama. The Fault In Our Stars is painfully smug as it relishes in its idiotic quirks. Each one deserves a ferocious eye roll. Its Manic Pixie Dream Boy Ansel Elgort encapsulates everything wrong with its smarminess, contrivances and pretence. Thank god the film got bored of him by the second half. And we're trapped with these two characters, only offering us a Laura Dern or Willem Dafoe to look at occasionally. I quite like its fantasies and it has a few decent moments where actual obstacles confront the characters without the film opting for easy solutions. But they're swiftly ruined by baffling decisions such as having an audience clap for their kiss in Anne Frank's house. When it isn't schmaltzy, the film revels in its trivialities and indiscernible philosophies. Shailene Woodley's conviction of the trite material is decent, but the film has such an ugly production that there's little to redeem it above mediocrity.
5/10