Utterly phony treacle to its very core, Charlie St. Cloud (2010, Burr Steers) is an insult to those of us who enjoy cozying up to a good studio tearjerker. Key character relationships intended to provide an emotional anchor are defined solely by boilerplate exposition, and are further marred by a glaring lack of emotional logic.
Take the bond between former champion sailor Charlie (Zac Efron) and his dead little brother, Sam (Charlie Tahan), who he can see as a ghost due to the near-death experience he had in the same car accident that claimed Sam's life. Charlie has rejected a life of nautical glory to work in the cemetery where Sam is buried, and for five years, he has kept his promise to Sam to meet up with him every day at sundown and play catch with him. When Charlie nearly misses one of his playdates with Sam because he's spending time with Obligatory Love Interest Tess (Amanda Crew), Sam erupts in a petulant tantrum. Now, if a silly late-film bit of exposition establishes that Sam has aged five years in the afterlife even though he appears the age he was when he died to Charlie, then that means Sam is now at the maturity level of a boy in his late teens. So if Sam possesses a young-adult level of empathetic awareness and loves Charlie very much, why the hell would he cry like a baby at the prospect of Charlie skipping one day of playing catch to spend time with a potential girlfriend? And what kind of loving brother would insist that Charlie give up his long-term career goals just to meet his daily ball-tossing requirements anyway?
Charlie's romance with Tess is equally wobbly in its development. Basically, we're asked to buy that Tess falls for Charlie merely because he's not the creep her father (Donal Logue) painted him out to be. Oh, and there's a dinner-date scene which establishes that Tess is a football fanatic while Charlie's favorite pastime is baseball. Because opposites attract, you see.
Sure, Efron's as cute as a million bunny rabbits, and perhaps the attractive medium close-ups that implicitly compare the baby blues of his eyes to the vast ocean framed in the background (cinematographer Enrique Chediak, who recently collaborated with fellow d.p. Anthony Dod Mantle to great effect on 127 Hours, refuses to phone it in here, bless 'im) will be enough to sustain his fan base. But he has yet to prove himself as anything other than a talented song-and-dance man (if only studios still turned out musicals with Golden Age-reminiscent regularity!) who can sometimes fluorish in a non-musical project as long as his scene partners keep him on his toes (as happened throughout Richard Linklater's excellent Me and Orson Welles). Here, the bland Crew gives him little to play off of, and seasoned pros Logue, Kim Basinger, and Ray Liotta pop up too briefly to give him any real kind of assist. He's mostly adequate in emotionally demanding scenes, but more often than not, he merely poses with a laughably Derek Zoolander-esque air of self-regard. I remember reading an interview with John Waters wherein the bad-taste maestro behind Pink Flamingos wittily predicted that Efron would one day win an Oscar for playing against type as a junkie. After star-vehicle duds like 17 Again and now this, I'm starting to seriously doubt Waters' clairvoyant abilities. Grade: D+
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