The Lovely Bones

THE LOVELY BONES (2009) - Feb. 24, 2010
A disappointing and pretty mediocre film from Peter Jackson about a young girl who is murdered, and who then observes her family from the afterlife.  The film is well made, and I was enjoying it for the first twenty minutes or so, but after a while I just found myself losing interest, and by the end I was quite bored.  The movie felt really disjointed, like a random collection of scenes -- the afterlife stuff and the family drama never quite gelled, and the movie really lacked any kind of narrative momentum.  It didn't help that the film spent an absurd amount of time with the girl just wandering around in the afterlife, and that the nature of how she was actually observing her family was never really made clear -- the movie would cut between something happening with her family and her standing in a field or something, and the implication would be that she was somehow watching her family, but how?  Was there a big TV screen in the sky?  That's a definitely a nit-pick, though.  There were some individual scenes that I liked (such as the tense scene in which the girl's sister sneeks into the killer's house), and the film was certainly well made and well acted, but overall it just didn't work.  **