Verdict: * 1/2 – – –

Okay, so… I’m as much a believer in the afterlife and near death experiences as the next spiritual person. My daughter is also, being a chip off the ol’ block and she has been begging me to rent this one for her for weeks. It being a PG-13, I figured it was not an issue, even when it heavily deals with the concept of death and what happens afterwards. Her mother and I passed on it, not really interested because we’re not really into young adult flicks, so she watched it on our laptop. But then we noticed after she watched it that she was really passive. If you know our daughter, you know that the word passive isn’t even in her thesaurus app, so this was a strange new experience for us. She didn’t eat much at dinner and for for the entire rest of the evening and next morning, she was completely bummed out.

So I figured I’d check this movie out myself the next day, to try and find out what about it that ruined her evening so maybe I could help bring her back from her depression. I hit play and was immediately hit with a normal family doing normal family things. Mia Hall (Chloë Grace Moretz), the teenage daughter of the family and the movie’s lead actress begins the story with an ominous voice over that pretty much explained why I felt like setting something on fire by the time the end credits rolled. She said, “Life is what happens when you’re busy making plans.

Okay, that makes sense to me. Depressing, but that makes sense. She is a concert cellist who meets local rocker Adam (Jamie Blackley) and they totally dig on each other. The cello is her absolute passion. Rock and roll is his. They get together somehow, but their different lifestyles totally don’t click. Somehow, they keep forcing this romance on us when every teenager I have ever met would have called it quits after the first date. Every time they looked at each other, I reminisced about the time I was drawn and quartered, then dragged over broken glass by watching the romantic scene between Padme and Annakin in Star Wars: Ep 3.

The one saving grace about this flick was the characterization of Mia’s parents (cheerily played by Mireille Enos and Joshua Leonard). These two are a blast in every single scene they chewed up and spit out and I found myself laughing out loud in some places just from their dialogue alone! It’s really too bad there are so few scenes because <BAM!> she and her entire family are in a car wreck on a snowy road outside of town and Mia finds herself standing barefoot in the afterlife next to her broken body.

[Alert! Alert! Spoilers Ahead! AaOooooooGah! AaOooooooGah!]

If you would like to remain completely surprised, read no further! You’ve been warned! Don’t worry though, I won’t give away anything really important and you probably won’t care anyway once you watch it. Just sayin’.

This entire flick is basically Mia’s life flashing before her eyes. One hour and forty six minutes of near death experienceness. Her entire family is dead and there are some relative (literally) tear-jerkerishly, rip-your-guts-out moments in some places. But for the most part I got kind of bored with the flashback scenes that focused almost entirely on Mia spending about a year and a half during high school with Adam, accompanied by subtle acoustic soundtracks like Ben Howard’s Promise, and watching her parents just be normal (albeit out-of-place hilarious) parents.

If Mia had lived a crazier life, if she’d operated somewhat in-the-moment instead of planning everything… heck, if she’d even had a friggin’ sense of humor, it might have been more entertaining. But as it was, her completely normal, vanilla flavored teenage life was completely normal and vanilla flavored and I found myself drifting off about a third of the way through it. Especially because I’m the father of an admittedly crazier, never-plans-anything, totally-lives-in-the-moment daughter with an incredible sense of humor.

The fact is, Mia was actually getting annoying about halfway through it. Mia is (was) all about herself. Everyone tried to make her happy in life. Her parents tried to give her everything she wanted but she moped about life not being fair. Adam, despite his hard upbringing and the pain he has gone through, was the nicest guy and totally went out of his way to do things she wanted to do while trying to succeed with the band, but she moped about how different their lives were. When Adam got signed to a record label, she was miffed that he was at a celebration party and moped that he didn’t pay more attention to her. When she auditioned for Juilliard and totally knocked it out of the park, he told her they should celebrate and she moped, asking him why he never wrote a song about her.

Eesh. High maintenance much? I was actually hoping this romance of theirs would just end so we could get back to the point of the story. The more exciting parts of the movie are when her spirit is running around the hospital screaming about how much she wants her old mopey life back. And just when you think Yes! She’s finally going to let it go and just pass on and she’s about to walk down that tunnel of light… something pulls her back and here comes another relentless flashback. Gah!

By this time, I wanted to tear my own eyes out and pour lighter fluid over them. When the credits rolled I was literally gritting my teeth, rocking back and forth in a fetal position and I didn’t even hit Stop on the remote. I just ejected the DVD and snapped it angrily back into the case. 

Oh my God. I don’t say this too often, but this is literally an hour and forty six minutes I will never get back and when my own life flashes before my eyes after I pass on, I just hope I can fast forward through this part of it!