Yes, I'm reviewing this movie specifically because it isn't fantasy. Not once while I was watching it did it ever occur to me that it had anything to do with fantasy and yet when I read some reviews to see if everyone thought it was as ridiculous as I did I see hundreds of people referring to it as a fantasy story. This made me kind of angry, because the movie lacked the thing that is essential to any fantasy story: believability. When you throw readers/viewers into a new world or a world with a speculative or fantastical premise you then have to take great pains to make sure that everything works in logical and believable ways and has rules and so on. This movie had no fantastical or speculative element and it failed to maintain even a shred of believability - and for some reason reviewers think that this automatically makes it a fantasy tale and that it's ok to do stuff like that in fantasy stories. No.
In fact, this movie might just be the most mis-labeled thing I've ever seen. The terms that are used to refer to it in reviews are so far removed from what I saw in the movie that I'm beginning to think there's a new dictionary everyone's using that I never heard of. It's not horrendous, I managed to watch it to the end and I liked some things about it, but it's just not fantasy and it's not the hundreds of other things that reviewers have called it either.
World-Building: *headdesk* Annoying, but if there was a lower rating on my scale, I'd use it.
Characterization: Great (some characters)
Plot: Beyond Ridiculous.
MASSIVE SPOILERS AHEAD - YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED
This movie starts off with the lamest sequence I have ever personally witnessed. I'm still not sure what exactly they were going for there: the kid was standing in a field of really tall grass and he seemed to be directing it...or something. I almost stopped watching, but then I thought that it couldn't possibly get any more ridiculous.
So, the main character is a boy named Evan who lives in an orphanage and hears music in everything around him and he just knows that his parents are out there somewhere and wants to find them. It completely failed to make me care for the kid. Even when he was being bullied by the other boys I was sitting there wondering why they were overusing the word freak and why the other kid had such an annoying haircut and why Freddie Highmore was trying to put on an American accent and so on.
Speaking of Freddie Highmore, I didn't think he was a brilliant actor or anything when I saw him in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, but at least then he was speaking in his natural-sounding British accent. I'm used to complaining about Americans trying to sound British so I never thought I'd be this annoyed by a Brit trying to sound American: I am. It just doesn't work and it adds to the jarring lack of believability that runs through the entire movie. Mainly, though, he just failed to make me care at all for the character. This wasn't totally his fault, much of the blame lies with whoever wrote the script. It's full of the most ridiculous cliche nonsense.
Moving on... it was clear from the very beginning that the main point of this movie was that Music was going to bring the family back together and that Music is this awesome, mystical force that does amazing things. There were various painful scenes where they focused in on random things like kids bouncing basketballs and tried to show the viewers the kid's point of view and how he hears music in everything. I kept waiting for there to be awesome music, but it just never happened. There was so much potential there that wasn't met, which ended up making these sequences annoying.
So far, the movie failed to create emotional attachment or sell the whole "Music is the Force and this kid will be the ultimate Jedi-Master and harness it in order to find his parents" message.
Just before I gave up on it two things happened that made me want to keep watching. They started to show flashbacks of how his parents met and Terrence Howard showed up. I'm not entirely sure why, but I started to tear up in that first scene with Terrence Howard. Maybe it was just the renewed hope that his stellar acting would actually make this movie awesome? It probably won't surprise you to hear that he was painfully underused throughout the movie.
As for the flashbacks... actually, I can't make one general statement about the flashbacks; they were all over the place.
This film has been referred to in other places as a "family film". This concerns me a little bit. I don't have any kids, but if I did the last thing I would want to watch with them would be a movie that suggests that the following relationship arc is not only normal, but also "romantic" or in any way desirable (we'll leave realistic aside for now):
The Relationship Arc:
-Meet on Rooftop after escaping a party where others are drinking heavily and sharing saliva and so on
-Talk for 3 minutes
-Kiss
-Wake up Next Morning and decide to meet somewhere in a couple of hours
-Be torn apart because you both have flights that you didn't think of when you decided to meet (and very annoying family members who insist you must get on the actual flights)
-Have no hope of ever contacting each other unless you both happen to be in the same city in previously decided upon meeting place at exactly the same time (I'm not asking for i-phones, here, but you know, if people really want to meet or talk there are options for this in the modern world)
-Both give up your entire careers and spend 11 years trying to hide from it because of some sort of painful emotional attachment you feel towards someone that you haven't even attempted to contact
- 11 years later you find the person again almost "magically" because you were both drawn by some lame song in a park
Like I said, this is the most ridiculous relationship arc ever conceived. Are they trying to say that sleeping with a stranger you talked to for two minutes can possibly have a good outcome? This implication made me feel really sorry for the kid who had to spend 11 years being bullied and called a freak in an orphanage because of these people's decisions - and for the millions of real kids in the world who will have to go through much worse when idiots believe the nonsense in this movie and follow these people's example.
Unfortunately any theoretical sympathy I may have felt at this point was then crushed by lame script-writing, unconvincing acting on the kid's part, and then the kid suddenly becoming a musical genius. Geniuses don't make very likable characters, and the fact that this child doesn't actively do anything doesn't help matters.
The boy finds his way to New York (which is where the parents met) and there's a whole little storyline that was taken right out of Oliver Twist, except they forgot all the hardship. Out little unsympathetic hero is supposed to be Oliver, he meets a kid who is the equivalent of Dodger, except he sings instead of stealing, and then there's Robin Williams as "The Wizard" aka Fagin. The movie actually surprised me by making Robin Williams' character exactly like Fagin, I was expecting him to remain good/nice, but then suddenly he turned into this scary, greedy, controlling person. Not really sure what would have been better: to stick with the nothing-will-go-wrong atmosphere of the film or to stick with Fagin's exact characterization in Oliver Twist even thought there's no hardship and no real stakes. It's a lose-lose situation.
I would love to know if the people calling this movie "Dickensian" have ever read anything by Dickens. Charles Dickens portrayed, in no uncertain terms, the hardship and suffering that was part of his world. He went into the workhouses and the debtor's prisons and into the heads of people who were starving and people who had lost everything. His work was undiluted social commentary. Nothing could be further from his work than this movie, even if they did steal half the characters from Oliver Twist.
Anyway, the Wizard names the kid August Rush so that the movie can move on.
Then, suddenly, the kid finds all these really helpful people, most of them Black people who are good and just going about their lives when they meet him and decide to help. All of them were much better actors than the lead, and most of them way more convincing musicians. I was pleased to see so many positive portrayals of Black people in one movie, but their awesome acting just made the kid's characterization seem all the more ridiculous.
The ridiculousness came to it's peak when this boy who hadn't ever played an instrument or seen a musical note before suddenly began to compose his masterpiece. Oh wait - first a little six-year old pointed to the piano and told him something about the keys and he called her an angel. So after this touching one-minute music lesson he's now prepared to compose his musical masterpiece by listening to kids playing basketball through the window and writing stuff down in musical notation he's never laid eyes on before. I don't know alot about music, but even I could tell this was ridiculous. I was even ok with him naturally being able to play instruments without any previous exposure or practice, but this sudden ability to work with musical notation was taking it a step too far.
And then, of course, he ends up at Juilliard and wows everyone with his genius. At this point I was beyond caring. So, in order to keep this review from getting too much longer I'm going to end this with a list of the rest of the unbelievable/ridiculous things that happened in this movie.
- No one in this movie has ever heard of a fake name and they don't bother investigating further or contacting the police or child services when eleven year old "August Rush" doesn't turn up on any kind of record - or whatever lame phrase they used in the film.
- "The Wizard" is able to turn up and take the kid away after openly blackmailing/pressuring the kid in front of a roomful of adults.
- He keeps slapping the guitar and somehow this produces awesome music
- Nobody asks him why he spent the night sleeping under a little girl's bed in a Church... and no one notices him as he plays the piano and composes his masterpiece ALL DAY in the same Church
- He goes back with The Wizard... why does he do this? I really don't understand it...
- After 11 years Lewis is suddenly able to find out where Lyla lives by going to her website, but he never thought of doing this before, even after leaving his career because he was pining over her...getting a finance desk job just seemed the more logical option, I guess
There's more, but you get the idea. Zero believability. It's not fantasy, no fantasy story would dare be this ridiculous and there was no speculative element.
The highlights of this movie for me were the scenes with Terrence Howard in them, and the one scene when father and son meet and connect, but don't actually recognize each other.
If you're a fantasy lover who is puzzled by the bad image that fantasy has you should watch this so that you can see what gives the genre a bad name. Otherwise, don't bother.
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