Hereafter

By guest writer Will Tooke

Imagine yourself a film investor and one day, you are brought a new project, a script called ‘Hereafter’. It’s written by Peter Morgan, who wrote The Queen, Frost / Nixon and The Damned United, all of which are great films. Clint Eastwood is slated to direct, Matt Damon will star, and Steven Spielberg will produce. It’s a no brainer, right? It ticks every box. Sounds like a sure fire contender come awards season, right? You’d be stupid not to part with money to get this baby off the ground. So you sign the cheque on the dotted line, and contribute to the $50 million dollar budget.

Fast forward a year or so. You see the final cut of the film, and realise you’ve just made a massive mistake. It’s one of those films where you’re sat waiting for it to get good – but it just never does. If anything it gets worse. A lot worse.

Matt Damon plays George. In a particularly limp bit of exposition, we learn that an operation on his brainbox when he was a kiddywink left him psychic. So now whenever he touches people, he gets flashes of their dead loved ones, and can talk with them for a bit, before they bugger off into the mysterious ‘hereafter’.  Problem is, it means that he can’t ever get close to women, because inevitably that involves touching people. From this, I deduce that George is probably a virgin, because sex involves, you know, touching people. I mean imagine having to have a conversation with someone’s dead nan just as you’re getting it on with them. Nightmare. Of course, we feel sorry for George. He’s a nice guy. Whereas other mediums and psychics are charlatan snake oil merchants, George is the real deal. He doesn’t do it for the money. In fact, he doesn’t do it at all because as he will tell us at least twice in the script IT’S NOT A GIFT, IT’S A CURSE! In the meantime, his insensitive brother tries to persuade him to get rich using his talents. Poor bloke. Basically, George is an alright guy, but he’s really, really boring.  Will he be able to come to terms with his ability (did I mention that IT’S NOT A GIFT, IT’S A CURSE!?), and will he find love? Spoiler Alert: Yes, yes he will.

Meanwhile, half a world away in Paris, a generically plucky female journalist, Marie Lelay (Cécile De France) is investigating ‘the other side’. She does this because during the 2004 tsunami, she had a near death experience, glimpsing the great hereafter. Which looks shadowy and blurry and a bit crap, mainly because Eastwood splurged away most of the special effects budget recreating a Thai market getting swept away in a swirling torrent of bamboo and bodies. It’s the only bit of the film that made me sit up, and it was over in the first ten minutes. And even then, the CGI wasn’t all that great.

The third strand brings Marcus(played by twin brothers Frankie and George McLaren) a troubled cockerrnee waif of a lad whose twin brother Jason gets splatted by a white van man whilst running away from some hoodied youths. He later gets placed into care as his single mum is on heroin. Because this kid is basically the poster boy for Broken Britain, I was kind of surprised some knife crime wasn’t casually thrown into his story for good measure. In for a penny, in for a pound. Marcus misses his brother, and longs for a way to contact him. He tries psychics, but they are the bad kind of psychics who aren’t real psychics at all. Why, if only he could find a real psychic. Can you see what’s coming? Of course you bloody can, because the storyline has no subtlety whatsoever. It doesn’t so much signpost what’s to follow, as it does rip the signpost out of the narrative roadside and smack you round the head with it.

After Jason’s ghost saves his twin from the 7/7 tube bombings (no, really), the various plot strands sluggishly converge at a London book fair (no, really) where Lelay is promoting her new book about the other side, where George is attending a reading of his favourite author – Charles Dickens – and where Marcus’s well-meaning foster parents bring him for a reason that’s too earth shatteringly hackneyed to mention here. Come the end, you just won’t care anymore.

Damon manages to soldier on throughout, giving a solid performance as George – against the odds, given the script – but even if you’re a diehard fan of his, you might as well save some money and wait a few weeks to see him in True Grit, which is an exponentially better film. Eastwood, who has done great things as a director – particularly with Flags of our Fathers and Invictus, really drops the ball with Hereafter. We can only hope he gets it back together for next year’s promising sounding Dustin Lance Black penned J.Edgar Hoover biopic, starring Leonardo DiCaprio.

Black, like Morgan, is historically a great screenwriter, but if anything is to be learnt from Hereafter, it’s that films are won and lost largely on how good or bad the script is.  In the case of Hereafter, it never rises above being stunningly bad. The fleeting mention of a religious conspiracy somehow quashing scientific research into the hereafter is at least an interesting idea, but it never gets developed. But then that’s hardly a surprise seeing how the film never offers anything approaching answers to any of the questions it sets up. Where exactly are the people that George glimpses in the hereafter? Is it heaven? Is there a heaven? No answers are forthcoming, because all that’s like, well mysterious and stuff, yeah? The ‘mystery’ allows Peter Morgan to lazily scramble out the corner he wrote himself into. Perhaps the film makers kidded themselves into believing they are prompting the audience to think about the profound questions of death and the afterlife, but the only real question this film begs is how the hell did it get made in the first place?

 

I don’t think we’ll ever know.

Degree-Fail.

The first truly bad film of 2011, all the more inexcusable given the talent behind it.

With tedious dialogue and a poor storyline, this will surely be remembered as an embarrassing

career blip for all involved. Melodrama of the worst order.

You have been warned.

(If you are confused about the rating system please click on the ‘About This Blog Page’ which will explain it all)

Hereafter

At the end of January (28th january) legendary actro/director Clint Eastwood will release a movie that battles with death, the afterlife and the supernatural. This is certainly a new direction for Eastwood, but he has recruited favourite Matt Damon (who he worked on Invicitus with) to help him through the transition. LWith a screen play by the writer of ‘The Queen’ and ‘Frost/Nixon’ this has the potential to be an insightful and moving film.