Movie Review: Beautiful Creatures

The trend these days is to take successful, and I use the term liberally, book and base a movie off of it, a young adult book, specifically.  In the void that Twilight left, we have Beautiful Creatures, a tepid love story that is overly predictable and tiresome, despite some big A listers joining the cast, such as Jeremy Irons and Emma Thompson.  The young cast, minus the always lovely Zoey Deutch, Kyle Gallner and Thomas Mann, I was utterly unimpressed.  The two leading actors Alden Ehrenreich and Alice Englert lacked any sort of sympathy from the very beginning, despite the various attempts that the story made to make them both seem likable.  I found Ehrenreich was just blah throughout the movie, trying to reach some higher level of connexion with the audience, but never quite making it.  Englert played the damsel in distress passable, but I found them both obnoxious and difficult to watch.

What makes this movie so unbecoming is that nothing ‘new’ happens, the story is so predictable, it was like I could have written it as I watched it.  There was nothing to the story, less to the acting, and even the cinematography didn’t have much to it.  As I watched the movie, you could feel there was more there, probably worth reading, but the movie was just not well done.  For $6, I can’t complain, but I’d never recommend it either.  If you liked the books, maybe, but if you’re looking for something to fill the YA hole in your heart, keep moving.