A passable flick

IN every good story there is a sense of duality and balance, the dark side and the force, the right and wrong etc. But what happens when there is a grey area?

In The Lovely Bones, the audience is taken on a journey of self-discovery and introduced to the concept that sometimes right and wrong is never black and white.

When a young girl named Susie is abused and murdered by her deranged neighbour, her soul floats away to an otherworldly place where she watches over her family (and in a bizarre twist of fate, her killer).

Since she somehow has the vague ability to affect circumstances on earth, she must weigh her desire for vengeance against her killer with her desire for her family to come to terms with her death.

Her murder leads to the detriment of those she leaves behind, her mother Abigail refuses to accept life without her precious daughter, while her father, Jack, spirals out of control as he desperately attempts to accept his failure to protect Susie, and ultimately figure out who killed her.

Susie observes how her disappearance (her body has not been found) affects the lives of her parents, her sister and a local girl who (as luck would have it) is apparently sensitive to ghosts ... sort of like The Sixth Sense, but without the clever twist.

The film is narrated by Susie (although she is dead when we first hear her voice), setting up the 70s household she grew up in. The day you die is probably much like any other day but not in the movies. On the day she dies, the most popular boy in school tells her she's beautiful and asks her out on date (unlucky there, Susie).

The investigations into her death are gripping and credit where it's due, Peter Jackson really shows off his skills as a thriller director with several tense sequences. But it's when the camera leaves the real world and settles on the gloriously coloured canvasses, filled and superimposed smiling faces, that the film begins to become dull and, in my opinion, a little bit sickly.

This film receives partial credit for blurring the line between wrath and righteous indignation, but that is almost overpowered by the lacklustre dialogue, which, at times, is more painful to watch than Susie's death.

Overall, this film is passable at best but if you're looking for a good movie about ghosts, I find Ghostbusters never fails to impress.