[SERENA
opens in Cleveland on Friday March 27th exclusively at the Cedar Lee
Theatre.]
Review
by Bob Ignizio
Within its first ten minutes, SERENA
resoundingly establishes its credentials as a bad movie. Unless you
have to watch the movie to review it, or you're a masochist
(sometimes feels like the same thing), you should cut your losses at
this point. The film is badly cast, badly written, badly directed,
badly edited, and badly scored. At least cinematographer Morten
Søborg does his job well, but no matter how well you film a traffic
accident, it's still a traffic accident.
SERENA
lurches awkwardly from one scene to another, its clunky dialogue
filled with exposition that still somehow fails to adequately explain
who its characters are, what they are doing, and why they are doing
it. It's the kind of movie where the male lead, an unlikeable logging
tycoon played by Bradley Cooper, takes one look at the female lead, a
beautiful but tragic (and equally unlikeable) femme fatale played by
Jennifer Lawrence, and not only falls in love immediately, but
proposes to her as soon as he can chase her down on horseback. Said
proposal is then followed by the obligatory, utterly unerotic,
soft-focus sex scene. That whole sequence is so silly and poorly
executed as to be at least worthy of a snicker, but for the most part
the film doesn't quite reach the sublime level of “so bad it's
unintentionally funny”, settling for dreary mediocrity instead.
Based
on a best selling novel and packed with Award-winning or nominated
A-list talent (Lawrence is an Oscar winner, Cooper has been
nominated, and Bier's IN A BETTER WORLD
won the 2010 “Best Foreign Language Film” Oscar), it's obvious
that this period romance/melodrama set in the mountains of North Carolina was intended to be
Oscar bait itself. Exactly how and why it failed so miserably has
been the subject of much verbiage by critics. The one thing that's for sure
is no one took the bait, and neither should you. 1 out of 4 stars.
No comments:
Post a Comment
We approve all legitimate comments. However, comments that include links to irrelevant commercial websites and/or websites dealing with illegal or inappropriate content will be marked as spam.
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.