Maybe Impossible but not Really Enjoyable

Rating: 4/10 (16 February 2013)

Naomi Watts was phenomenal as Maria and skillfully played a severely wounded part for almost the entire movie (either struggling to move or from a hospital bed). I can honestly say that her performance is the best acting from an actress I saw in 2012.
The make-up, depicting all manner of gruesome injuries and the set design, trying to re-create the rubbish from the tsunami, was superb and very effective.
I also like that although the movie was based on a Caucasian family (who lived in Japan but was vacationing in Thailand for Christmas), the indigenous Thai people are portrayed as caring and sympathetic in this movie. The reason this really stood out to me, because I watched ARGO recently and was stunned at how one-dimensional, stereotypical, and negatively the Iranian people were portrayed. Here, in THE IMPOSSIBLE, the Thai are rendered much more humane and are critical for the protagonist family in their attempt to reunite.
However, the reason for the low star-rating is mostly due to how the movie drags on after the first 20-30 minutes. Perhaps that was intended to get more and more shots of carnage and to impart a sense of hopelessness (this movie did make me feel hopeless once or twice, but not in the way the director probably wanted!). Really, the whole quest seemed "impossible" though it was based on a true story. Again, not really the "impossible" that the director was probably going for, but rather impossible to care about and implausible.
Another major issue I had was that we leave Ewan McGregor's Henry until nearly an hour of the film has elapsed. The problem is that I felt Ewan seemed to try to overact his scenes to get the most out of it, probably because he was left out of so many scenes. I normally enjoy McGregor's performances but I thought he came off as amateurish and lame in this role.
I won't be critical of the children in the film, because that would be just mean. But, they did alright, and Tom Holland, the boy who played Lucas, had a large role and seems to have quite a future in the acting business.
TL;DR: Overall this was a movie that dragged on and failed to inject the viewer with the emotion that it needed to. It's sad because a film of this nature should make it easy to portray those tearjerking sentiments. Obviously, I understood the devastation and tragedy, having made a donation at the time this happened, but this movie failed to make me emote as some other tragic movies have. THE IMPOSSIBLE is watchable simply for Naomi Watts' performance and the opening 30 minutes. The rest is not worth watching.