Review - Beautiful Creatures (2013)

Starring Alden Ehrenreich, Alice Englert and Jeremy Irons.
Directed by Richard LaGravenese.

Now that the Twilight Saga is over, film writers and directors find it completely fitting to jump on the supernatural teen love wagon and adapt every one of these books into movies - hoping to garner the same audience and success. Like Twilight, The Host and now Beautiful Creatures, they have so much in common. The most common trait is that they all really sucked.

In Beautiful Creatures, it is pretty much the same love story involving a human falling for a non-human. It's not werewolves, vampires or aliens this time - it is witches with vast powers. They refer to themselves as casters and one such caster, Lena Duchannes (Alice Englert) falls in love with a human Ethan Wate (Alden Ehrenreich). The movie's plot is pretty much Ethan and some of Lena's family members trying to prevent Lena from falling to the dark side on her approaching 16th birthday. Lena has extraordinary powers and her evil cousin and mother, Ridley and Sarafine (Emmy Rossum and Emma Thompson) plot to to use her and her powers for world domination.

I've never read or heard of this novel before so I didn't really know what to expect of this adaptation. It was surprisingly more light-hearted and campy than I had imagined and there were bouts of funny one-liners and quirky characters. All in all, I think the acting was poor especially from the leads. As in, this is suppose to be a love story but their chemistry was off. I felt no spark between them really - they seemed more like best friends to me than love interests. Not only were the protagonists boring to me, I thought the antagonists were even worse. Emmy Rossum and Emma Thompson did what they could but they couldn't be taken seriously with those god-awful lines.

Even though the movie is two hours long, I don't know but... it still kinda felt rushed. Poor storytelling and I don't think there was a proper grasp of the history. The writers were all too keen on pulling off the lovey dovey crap between the Ethan and Lena so everything else was just bleh. Just when I thought the movie couldn't get any worse, the climax and ending happened. That has got to be one of the most poorly executed showdown I've ever seen. The effort in this movie was really not there; even the visual effects didn't look that great. On the flip side I actually liked the deep country accent and I did chuckle a few times throughout.

I think I would have liked Beautiful Creatures if it was much more dark and serious in tone instead of the overly comedic approach. It was just too silly and predictable for its own good.

Rating: 3.5/10



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