Director : Rob Reiner.
Writers : Guy Thomas, Rob Reiner, and Andrew Scheinman.
Stars : Morgan Freeman, Virginia Madsen and Madeline Carroll.
Review :
Rob Reiner's latest film thankfully has a couple great performances or else we'd be looking at one of the worst movies of the year. Morgan Freeman plays Monte Wildhorn, a writer who has lost pretty much all of his touch, desire to live and has become a cranky alcoholic. He's sent to a summer home to try and come up with some fresh ideas but he just keeps going deeper into the bottle until he meets his divorced neighbor (Virginia Madsen) and her three daughters. THE MAGIC OF BELLE ISLE is one of the most sentimental movies ever made but it's so poorly directed, edited and written that you can't help but roll your eyes at how stupid it actually is. I don't mind movies trying to make you cry or feel warm but this thing here goes so far overboard that it really did seem like an eight-year-old girl wrote it. The dialogue is beyond bad and for the life of me I couldn't figure out what the film was trying to do. This is the type of film that is so lazily written that you can't help but want to throw your hands up and just give up on the entire thing. Everything in this movie just happens for no apparent reason. Normally you'd have some sort of character development with a mean drunk turning into a nice angel but that doesn't happen here. Instead of giving us situations that we can believe in, the film simply has stuff happen just so the film can move along. Mommy having trouble with the oldest daughter? The problem is easily solved in the matter of seconds. Every "issue" is so easily handled that you can't help but feel the lazy writing is letting everyone down. What keeps the film going are the performances of Freeman and Madsen. Both of them deliver strong performances, although I must say that neither has too much to work with. One wishes that the screenplay had been a little more demanding so that the two really could have had more fireworks together. Thankfully both of them are great enough because otherwise we'd be left with a real mess of a film.
Credits by Michael_Elliott.
Source image : http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1839654/
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