The Last Song

I think I just need to get this out of the way because I fear that otherwise it will seep into the rest of the review. This shouldn’t have affected my viewing of the movie, but I have to say it did. Even when Miley Cyrus is not making any particular face, her cheeks and mouth still do this strange drooping thing, like she’s pouting, all the time. It really bothered me. It made her already moody character seem even more disgruntled. Now I will move on to evaluate the movie and her acting without thinking of that.

Liam Hemsworth is a good-looking young fellow, and I admit to having seen movies purely because they have other similarly attractive fellows in them. However, he was not the reason I saw this film. But, by the end, I felt I needed to say I’d seen it for him as a defense. I was unimpressed with the writing and the majority of the acting in this film. Characters like the troubled red-headed girl seemed unneeded. While a few extra scenes before the two teens declare their love for each other would have been nice. It’s true that the story is rather tragic, but is that supposed to be enough? Liam Hemsworth and Greg Kinnear both did fine jobs. But, the performance I was most moved and impressed by was the young boy, Bobby Coleman. I won’t ruin it for you, but there’s a scene near the end that is heartbreaking because of his excellent acting. Watching someone like Cyrus is always hard to do because as an actress and star she comes with so much baggage. I tried to let all that go, but I have to say, I couldn’t help feeling that her fame got her the role someone else could have performed better. She played a teenager, angry and grumpy and ultimately not such a bad person, but nothing Cyrus did left me feeling connected to her character. The dialogue she said often seemed random and cliché, a hard effect to accomplish, but it actually made me think that perhaps she was improvising (also, I saw an interview where she said she never learned her lines, so that may have affected my opinion as well). If not, than it truly was the writers’ fault because this stuff was akin to the dialogue catastrophe of Star War III. I could see how this could make a good novel, as I’ve heard it is, but too much was missing from the film. Partly because of the time issues that don’t allow a director to include all of a book I’m sure, but also because the commitment didn’t seem to be there. I’d skip it.