Star vehicle for Miley Cyrus has predictably weak premise “The Last Song” is the last straw. For film critic and discerning moviegoer alike, it’s just too much, forcing not one but two offending popular entities on us: Nicholas Sparks and Miley Cyrus.
If you go
“The Last Song”
1 out of 5 stars
Stars: Miley Cyrus, Greg Kinnear, Kelly Preston, Liam Hemsworth
Director: Julie Anne Robinson
Rated PG for thematic material, some violence, sensuality and mild language.
Running time: 108 minutes
It’s bad enough that the reigning sovereign of schmaltz, best-selling author Sparks, perpetrates another female-pandering bit of box office balderdash less than eight weeks after his “Dear John.” Worse yet, he co-wrote the screenplay for today’s tearjerker expressly for Miss Cyrus, turning it into a novelization afterward. (If a Hemingway novel is like a Kobe beef steak, then a “novelization” is the literary equivalent of a greasy truckstop burger. And anything by Sparks is the grease.) Cyrus as drama queen? This extends an alarming trend paved by Mandy Moore and Hilary Duff before her. Cyrus joins those kiddie-cable sitcom stars who try to transition into major motion pictures. Unfortunately, she can’t act her way out of the proverbial paper bag. A lack of emotional expressiveness and classic presence — that is hard to hide on a giant silver screen.
However “Last Song” may do financially for Disney, as helmed by TV director Julie Anne Robinson, their “Hannah Montana” cash cow is almost as unbelievable as the plotting.
With Sparks behind it and the word “last” in the title, you know someone is going to die. It’s just a matter of who and how insanely melodramatic the death will be.
Because the movie is aimed at teenage girls, it first dwells a full hour on banal beach vacation romance. It develops between the misunderstood outsider ingenue Ronnie (Cyrus) and perfect hot rich guy Will (played by Miley’s real life Aussie boyfriend Liam Hemsworth). Then, almost as afterthought, a subplot involving a church fire resolves and then someone gets ceremoniously killed off.
The potential victims include Ronnie’s estranged musical composer father (Greg Kinnear), her understanding mother (Kelly Preston), her stereotypically precocious 10-year-old brother (young Bobby Coleman in the only unaffected performance), and an assortment of antagonistic adolescent peers who serve merely as thinly drawn story devices.
What’s a little domestic abuse of a secondary character, accidental pyromania and sanitized sudden-onset cancer mortality when a cute couple gets to overcome obstacles to be together? It’s hard to decide what’s most absurd: That a provincial pop singer plays a classical pianist protagonist who reads Tolstoy for fun or that kids will pay to see her do it.
