Lovely Bones, The

Aroview: Peter Jackson’s errant, though wonderfully imagined murder mystery begins with the brutal death of a teenage girl in small town Pennsylvania, thereafter observing both the hunt for her killer, and her family’s struggle to cope with her disappearance from the vantage point of a spectacularly rendered afterlife.

Possessing many of the characteristics of Jackson’s cinema, in particular the way it favors the story's fantasy elements, the film’s special effects-driven asides are ultimately too dominant and irrelevant to the matters at heart, leaving viewers with a dramatically weak, unrewarding tale that promises, but never really delivers on the core themes of grief, resolve, and coping with death. Squandering its earnest ensemble cast (who are largely props in the director’s vision), this remains mostly watchable as a thriller (courtesy of a creepy Stanley Tucci), and occasionally effective as a tearjerker. Based on Alice Sebold’s widely-read novel, which fared much better with its sobering material, it has to be said.

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