Movie Review: Hereafter

Last night, my mom and I watched Clint Eastwood's recent film "Hereafter."

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD

"Hereafter" takes place in 2004 and 2005 and switches between three main characters. Matt Damon plays George, a psychic who can communicate with the dead but wants nothing more to do with his gift, which he calls a curse. The second character is Marie, a French reporter who has a near-death experience in the 2004 tsunami and decides to write a book about such experiences. The third character is Marcus, who loses his twin brother Jason and is placed in a foster home, where he tries to find a psychic who will enable him to talk to his dead brother. In the last twenty minutes of the film, these three characters finally collide in London, England.

The movie's plot was continually at a snail's pace, and I was constantly waiting for something to happen, but it never happened. There were a few exciting scenes like the tsunami or the train bombing in England, but they were rather out of place in the slow-moving plot. George doesn't do much except take an Italian cooking class and try to avoid giving people a reading, Marie spends her time thinking of her near-death experience and arguing with her publisher to get her controversial book published, and Marcus walks around in an emotionless daze, looking for a psychic or for some sign of his dead brother. And then, in the last twenty minutes, the plot becomes predictable when Marie ends up in London for a book fair and George is there on vacation, and the three characters finally interact, where Marcus finally accepts his brother's death and then George and Marie meet up to begin a romantic relationship. Other than that, there was no real goal for the plot, and it merely trudged along.

The characters were rather dull, and their experiences did not help the already-slow plot. Matt Damon is a talented actor, as seen in his roles in "Good Will Hunting" or the Bourne trilogy, but this was role was a waste of his talent; he spent most of the film complaining about his psychic abilities, and I felt little sympathy for his character. Marie was also a very dry, uninteresting character, and I could have cared less if her boyfriend cheated on her or if she lost her job because of her book. Marcus was also uninteresting, and I found it difficult to sympathize with him as he struggled to deal with the grief of his brother's death. The only character who had a semblance of life was Bryce Dallas Howard as Melanie, who George meets in his class, but she disappeared early on from the story and was not brought up again. Interesting characters can often save a dull story, but the ones in this film only added to its trudging nature.

There was ultimately nothing interesting or memorable about "Hereafter." I spent the entire film feeling bored and wondering when it would be over. The three stories did not interact or mix very well, and the characters were boring and forgettable. The concept was interesting, but it was not well-done; it needed a lot more work if it was to be a memorable, dramatic story about death.

I give it one star out of five.