Birth of the Wicked

Rating: 3/10 (6 March 2011)

Yet another movie the bad reputation of which arrived before its theatrical premiere and also a movie that after reading enough unfavorable reviews I decided to wait for to see until I'd be able to catch it on TV for free. Surprisingly, it turned out not be Bottom 100 material like Meet the Spartans, the TV premiere of which I sadly caught a while ago. However, by no means is this a good movie either. And I approached it with an open mind.
Most negative *criticism* directed towards this movie is deserved. One of the most common is lousy acting. Now, when this was made, the main cast were all nobodies, so it was easy to blame director Hardwicke, especially as she handles the acting-free sequences so amateurishly. But, *who* do we have among the cast?
Sarah Clarke - we definitely know she can act. Ironically, though she practically has about as much roles done at the time of filming than the others put together, her part is a blink-an-you'll-miss-it. I guess proved talent costs.
Elizabeth Reaser - another veteran, charismatic and likable, whose work on Grey's Anatomy was really good and whose own TV series, The Ex List, was unjustly canceled. Not surprisingly, she too has a very small part.
Anna Kendrick - a mere year later proving in Up in the Air that she has the talent and it cannot possibly have developed in one year, thus vindicating herself of this mess.
Ashley Greene - among all the woodenness, she too struggles against the bland script and manages to convey that she's not hopeless like the utterly talentless, and worse, charisma-free Stewart and Pattinson.
Like Stewart and Pattinson, Lautner shows no talent either, but at least he has charisma that combined with his abs should guarantee him work for at least a decade. Frak, he could develop from beefcake into a serious actor just like Brad Pitt.
Most of the movie is so flat it isn't even unintentionally funny - except for the Bad Guys, who are laughable walking clichés. Even their entrance proper during the baseball game is laughable! Sure, the movie is based on a cheap, sanitized, dumbed-down, marketable-for-teens rip-off of the Sookie Stackhouse books by Charlaine Harris, so screenwriter Rosenberg cannot perform miracles on Meyer's weak source material. But it's really shocking how bad Burwell's music is, considering he already had in his accomplished CV the scores for, among others, No Country for Old Men, Adaptation., Three Kings, Being John Malkovich and The Big Lebeowski. Together with the ill-judged pop music songs it only serves to amplify the movie's weaknesses. Maybe Burwell wasn't inspired by the imagery and created music that would be on par with the other aspects of the movie.
There is one thing many of the movie's critics are wrong about: vampires and daylight. The original myth and Bram Stoker's book Dracula tell of vampires being able to walk in sunlight. The "sunlight kills" was Hammer Horror films' so pervasive an addition to the "rules" that most people cannot be but baffled if they see a vampire in sunlight. So, at least Twilight gets something right.
In the end, however, what we have here is a sluggish, less-than-average 3/10 movie that is just a waste of time. It's not painful like Meet the Spartans, but it isn't even close to being a Harry Potter, either, let alone The Lord of the Rings.