Starts great, but the resolution is perhaps too easy

Rating: 6/10 (13 January 2013)

This film starts off outstandingly, but kind of falls apart as it goes on. It's about a family vacationing in Thailand in Christmas of 2004. When the tsunami hits on Boxing Day, the family is separated. The mother (Naomi Watts) is gravely harmed. Her eldest son (Tom Holland) is with her. The father (Ewan MacGregor) is with the other two, younger sons, but he decides he must leave them with strangers while he searches for his wife and other son. The tsunami part is so harrowing that the rest of the film is bound to be at least a bit less interesting. At first, the fight for survival and frenzied searching is involving. Unfortunately, the final few sequences are fairly poor. First, for a father to leave his two youngest children, ages 7 and 5, with total strangers in a foreign country that has been devastated by absolute chaos seems truly bonkers. I sincerely hope that the film was just simplifying things and this guy in real life wasn't this stupid. Second, the big sequence where all separated members of the family find themselves at (or around) the same hospital and almost miss each other. The whole thing seems too cutesy, and also, in the end, way too easy. We're constantly reminded that everyone around this family is still desperately seeking their loved ones, many of whom we know have died, and these people find each other out of pure luck in what seems like less than 24 hours. In the end, it doesn't feel like these people suffered more than a minor inconvenience, especially when compared to what everyone else around them is going for. Really, this is the story of the luckiest family on the entire planet. There are plenty of good bits, though, even after the tsunami. I loved the long sequence where Tom Holland is trying to help other people who have lost their loved ones. Holland is really the MVP of the cast here. MacGregor and Watts are both good, but neither are award-worthy (Watts in particular is incapacitated through a large portion of the film, so I don't know why she got an Oscar nom for it).