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80Kevin Spacey, both as star and director, has created a hugely entertaining, highly empathetic portrait of a man for whom music was literally the thing that kept him alive.
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80Put simply, the film is a dazzling and fearless piece of showmanship.
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80As long as Spacey is singing, the movie soars.
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75Doing his own singing (an uncanny imitation), Spacey is a marvel.
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75It is also probably relevant that Spacey, in preparing the project, knew something we could not guess: He is a superb pop singer.
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75The imagination, energy, chutzpah and sheer affection shown for Darin by director-writer-star Spacey, who plays the singer, are admirable, kicky. This is a movie, that, like Darin himself, takes a lot of chances and delivers on many of them.
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70It's raffish, flashy, energetic, entertaining and not very deep.
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70Artfully structured, combining old-school MGM-type musical numbers with occasional postmodern flourishes to keep the narrative moving.
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63Spacey's brazen casting isn't as beyond the pale as it ought to be. In fact, it's hard to imagine this strange and only occasionally successful movie without him.
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63The real stars are the orchestrators and musicians who swaddled Spacey in a gorgeous blanket of sound.
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58It fails to persuade us that its subject is significant enough to be worth a movie.
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50Spacey is almost as swinging as Darin was, but his filmmaking leans toward tried-and-true formulas.
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50The film never gives you a real sense of what drove Darin on, fighting a heart ailment (from childhood rheumatic fever) and fighting an industry and press that wanted to pigeonhole him.
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50Had Spacey made Beyond the Sea 10 or 15 years ago, it might have been close to transporting.
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50Saved by energetic musical numbers.
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50Vanity: the surest road to mediocrity.
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50In the end, Spacey's devotion to Darin may have blinded him to the bigger picture.
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50Weirdly moving.
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50Anyone who thinks Beyond The Sea is a movie about Bobby Darin isn't paying close enough attention.
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50By offering up the feel-good, MGM-styled musical version, a movie you can hum along to, his biopic serves only as a giant question mark; why bother if you're going to excise the interesting and naughty bits.
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50Hindered by its own theatricality, Beyond the Sea feels at once hermetic, defensive and corny.
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50Beyond the Sea, with all its gaping faults, is the genuine article. It succeeds in being deeply and sincerely insincere.
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40You can't BECOME a character if you want to BE that character: Desperation isn't the same thing as acting. Spacey's mimicry is so precise, it's exhausting.
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40Apart from Caroline Aaron's turn as Darin's overbearing sister...Beyond the Sea has nothing to recommend it.
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38Clumsily merges fiction and reality, biography and musical fantasy, and breaks the fourth wall in a way that allows Spacey to lamely address his own miscasting.
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38The willfully eccentric Beyond the Sea seems to be telling us a lot more about its star and director, Kevin Spacey, than its ostensible subject.
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38Kevin Spacey is a darn good actor, and he's a pretty good singer to boot. But those traits alone do not excuse the painful experience to be had sitting through Beyond the Sea.
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30Much more "Splish" than "Splash."
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30This vainglorious biopic about Bobby Darin is really about what the '60s pop singer and actor means to Kevin Spacey.
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25Camp classic? You bet.
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25Jaw-droppingly awful.
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25The best reason to see it is Kate Bosworth as Sandra Dee.
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25It's simply an awful, awful film.
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20By the end of this wholly disorienting experience (this must be what it's like to be held captive in a Long Island supper club and force-fed hallucinogens), there's only one thing we damn well know, and it's that Kevin Spacey sure as hell believes he was born to play Bobby Darin.
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10Such a hopeless mess that there's no fun in tossing insults at its endless shortcomings.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 16 out of 21
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Mixed: 2 out of 21
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Negative: 3 out of 21
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WilliamD8
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StevenW.3
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KeithB.8