‘Last Song’: slow and teary vehicle for Miley Cyrus
Published 7:49 pm Tuesday, March 30, 2010
About 40 minutes into “The Last Song,” I was beginning to question the film’s status as a Nicholas Sparks adaptation. Nobody in the film was dying — how could this be from the pen of the doomy Mr. Sparks?
That questioned is resolved later in the movie, and suffice it to say that “The Last Song” fulfills the expectations of the author of “The Notebook” and “Dear John”: buckets of tears, romantic misunderstandings, weepy separations and illness.
The new twist here is that Sparks conceived the project for a specific teen actress, “Hannah Montana” star Miley Cyrus.
She plays Ronnie, a supposedly troubled New York girl dumped at her father’s place in seaside Georgia. Her mother (Kelly Preston) thinks it’ll be a good idea to spend the summer there, with Ronnie’s younger brother (Bobby Coleman) in tow.
What could happen to a girl at the beach? Exactly what you’d think: friction with Dad (Greg Kinnear), flirtation with a local hunk (Liam Hemsworth), rivalry with other girls. But I’ll bet you didn’t guess that Ronnie would be helping hatch a nest of sea-turtle eggs. So give Sparks some credit.
The cliche-ridden plot might be bearable as entertaining junk if it weren’t for the funereal pace. Audiences will be way ahead of the twists and turns contained herein.
Miley Cyrus is a blobby brunette with a voice like a truck driver, not yet in the Lohan phase of her career. She passes through the movie with the polish you’d expect from a 17-year-old showbiz veteran, not quite making us believe that Ronnie would be reading Tolstoy on the beach (yep, the movie goes there), but not being a complete dead zone, either.
It doesn’t really matter, because “The Last Song” is filled with utterly unbelievable people. Ronnie’s mom and dad are of course nice, caring and funny (but still nerdy enough to be recognizable as parents by the 15-year-old audience, to whom adults are hopelessly clueless) — which is fine, but then why and how would they ever have gotten divorced?
The younger brother is a fearsome little creature, like a 45-year-old existing in a tyke’s body. And Ronnie’s love interest is almost comically well-rounded; remember how in Elvis movies the hero is always a pearl diver, a hotel busboy and a musician? Here, Hemsworth is a volleyball player, a garage mechanic and an aquarium volunteer who swims with dolphins. But he still has time to read “Anna Karenina” with Ronnie.
It’s not hard to see why the fantasy aspects of Sparks’ stories are appealing, but something like “The Last Song” needs more zip to really catch on. And having said that, I suspect it will prove to be a big hit.
“The Last Song” (1 1/2 stars)
Another weepie from the pen of Nicholas “The Notebook” Sparks, this time tailor-made for the talents of teen star Miley Cyrus, a blobby brunette with a voice like a truck driver. Even if you allow that Sparks’ unbelievable characters have a certain fantasy appeal, the movie’s funereal pace makes it a tough slog. With Greg Kinnear.
Rated: PG for subject matter
Showing: Alderwood Mall, Everett, Galaxy Monroe, Marysville, Metro, Seven Gables, Woodinville, Cascade Mall
