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91As someone new to the material, I found Jackson’s film soulful, respectful, masterful, horrifying, rending and emotionally true. It may not be the Lovely Bones that you have in mind, but it’s a fine and powerful one.
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80Like “The Lord Of The Rings,” The Lovely Bones does a fantastic job with revered, complex source material. As terrific on terra firma as it is audacious in its astral plane, it is doubtful we’ll see a more imaginative, courageous film in 2010.
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75All this is conveyed in the remarkable performance of Ronan, an Oscar nominee for Atonement. She and Tucci -- magnificent as a man of uncontrollable impulses -- help Jackson cut a path to a humanity that supersedes life and death.
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75Yet so much about The Lovely Bones is so skillfully orchestrated, from the chillingly methodical villainy to the thrillingly paced manhunt, we can accept that we're in the hands of a higher power.
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70When else has the obscenity of child murder been the cause of such gravity and grace?
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63It's all a gorgeous error, a bonfire of overreach.
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63Though properly chilling when it’s supposed to be, it’s a film whose effects, script and performances keep it at arm’s length when it is supposed to be moving.
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60It’s a movie that tips toward overkill--even Ronan’s voice is amplified into a weird whisper. More quiet would have helped.
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60Hovers just this side of "Ghost Whisperer" kitsch but remains compulsively watchable thanks to its smart ensemble cast
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58A sad-but-hopeful, dramatic-but-gentle fairy tale intentionally made less upsetting for teens.
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50Jackson and his team tell a fundamentally different story. It's one that is not without its tension, humor and compelling details. But it's also a simpler, more button-pushing tale that misses the joy and heartbreak of the original.
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50Jackson has not cast himself well, though. He has slathered the imagery in the wrong kind of wonderment and hyperbole, both on Earth and in heaven.
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50The Lovely Bones is difficult viewing, a meticulously crafted experiment that, it turns out, wasn't worth it.
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50Some books are not meant to be adapted to the big screen. Alice Sebold's best-selling The Lovely Bones falls into that category.
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50The story told by Jackson's The Lovely Bones is the same as the one related by Sebold, but it lacks the complexity and empathy evident in the book.
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50The book floats sublimely above its dark theme; the movie sinks into the ridiculous.
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50It's a competently made movie - in Jackson's hands it could hardly be anything but - yet rarely a moving one.
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50By turns warmly sentimental, serial-killer sinister and science-fiction fantastical, The Lovely Bones was an unlikely book to achieve worldwide success. In the film version, those mismatched elements come back to haunt the story, so to speak, making the final product more hit-and-miss than unblemished triumph.
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50The filmmakers’ evident affection for the book expresses itself as a desperate scramble to include as much of it as possible, which leaves the movie feeling both overcrowded and thin.
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50How do you literalize heaven? It's a problem moviemakers have struggled with forever, and Jackson hasn't solved it.
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50If The Lovely Bones, at least for this critic, fails, it's certainly not for lack of metaphysical gumption...It's when the movie returns to earthly life, the prosaic world of suburban cul-de-sacs and family relationships, that it falters.
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50The Lovely Bones has been fashioned as a holiday family movie about murder and grief; it’s a thoroughly queasy experience.
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50For all its successes, Bones remains more crafted than sincere, more meant to look achingly pretty on the screen than to resonate in the heart.
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50As the murderer, Stanley Tucci is intensely creepy but, like almost everybody else in this movie, he’s more gothic figment than flesh and blood.
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40Jackson undermines solid work from a good cast with show-offy celestial evocations that severely disrupt the emotional connections with the characters.
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40I watched the film in an agitated space between engrossed and aghast.
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38A deplorable film with this message: If you're a 14-year-old girl who has been brutally raped and murdered by a serial killer, you have a lot to look forward to.
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38The result is almost suffocating: a movie that has been tinkered and fussed with until there is no spontaneity left -- no warmth or life or messiness.
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38It doesn't help any that Wahlberg, looking perpetually dumbstruck, is among the clunkiest line-readers working in movies today.
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38Ronan, however, transcends the script. She's innocent yet wise, gentle yet forceful. She's the one thing in this picture that shows how great a movie The Lovely Bones might have been, had the people who made it believed in the book with all their hearts.
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30How the devastating story of the senseless murder of a 14-year-old could be stripped of emotion is a feat in itself, though one of dubious achievement.
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25It leaves audiences in a limbo every bit as torturous as the one the protagonist is in.
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25The Lovely Bones, then, is something special: A spectacular, cringe-inducing failure as both a book adaptation and a film.
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20Peter Jackson siphoned out all the soulfulness that made the author's combination thriller/afterlife fantasy a best-seller. In its place is a gumball-colored potboiler that's more squalid than truly mournful.
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20A perfect storm of a movie disaster: You've got good actors fighting a poorly conceived script, under the guidance of a director who can no longer make the distinction between imaginativeness and computer-generated effects. The result is an expensive-looking mess that fails to capture the mood, and the poetry, of its source material.
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20In Jackson's hands, The Lovely Bones is doubly appalling. Part Disney's "Alice in Wonderland," part Fritz Lang's "M," the movie is horrific yet cloying, alternately distended and abrupt, sometimes poignant and often ridiculous.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 41 out of 68
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Mixed: 13 out of 68
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Negative: 14 out of 68
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BillyS.5