Lovely Bones is really, really, really, really, really… bad. I mean really bad. Really. Bad. Rrrrrrrrrrreally bad. In case you didn’t read the book, it’s better than the film version. Big surprise. “I’m Sally Salmon and this my story” we are told in this movie about a dead girl narrating her life from her after life. Her family grieves for her as the murderer sits in a room right across the street (IRONY!). As time passes she prances about in her very own Candyland… or purgatory, or something, I couldn’t actually tell and this film was not about to tell me so Candyland it is. What she does there and how that relates to what’s happening on our earthly plane is never explained, which actually might be a good thing seeing as how clumsy the film’s narrative is. Better to not explain than to to so badly.

As poorly constructed as the somewhat similar 2007 mystery “The Invisible” is, at least the dead protagonist in that story took on the role of a detective who investigates his mortal death and, accordingly, can only be revived or go to heaven (I forget which; again, not a good film) once the killer is caught. Dumb, yes, but at least there’s some measure of internal logic at work. Not here. The dead girl played by the promising young actress Saoirse Ronan (“Atonement”) has no control or agency. She’s dead in other words. So then what function does she serve other than standing around and watching us earthlings with bittersweet wonder? None. The film is more interested in giving you goosebumps and being sentimental (father lights a candle atop a ship in a bottle for daughter to see in the dark storm of night ::gags::, father cries, girl’s not-quite-lover writes her poetry) than exploring notions of death, cosmic justice, fate, and the after life. Not being analytical about this stuff is all well and good in many cases (“Ghost Town” for instance gets a pass) but being that the sentimentalism falls flat while the exploration of the physicality of one’s death is not even a concern there came a time during this film when I wondered, and not in the existential sense, what the point of all of it was. Again, there is none. The film is nonsense, a hollow spectacle of style over substance over common sense that displeases to the core.

Peter Jackson put his name on this film and I feel sorry for him. It bears his trademarks both pre and post “Lord of the Rings” which is as much of a blessing as it is a curse; there are swamps, there are horrible underwater effects (fans blowing on actor’s faces), there is death, there is evil there is good and there is fantasy. Oh, and there is also a lot of bull shit. I am officially done with this filmmaker because I see no future for him. I also pity Jackson because he seems to be in a similar (creative) limbo as his main character in this movie. After “Rings” Jackson wants to be known as a serious filmmaker on “Lovely Bones” when he tries to be that here his creative expressions end up more far fetched than any fantasy world he’s ever conjured up. The movie magic and visual mastery Jackson tapped into with thedecade defining “The Lord of the Rings” series has been negated by a duo of agonizing follows ups “King Kong” in 2005 and now “Lovely Bones.” A problem is that Jackson does not seem to have an emotional compass sharp enough to depict the real world. Fantasy and sloppy comic horror (“Dead Alive”) is what he’s able to do and do very well but anything else comes across as corny and amateurish. When he attempts to blend the two, as evident here, it’s a disaster. Where Jackson was once an clever innovator (“Forgotten Silver” and “Meet the Feebles”) and a cynical genus (“The Frighteners”–his other film about ghosts), he is now a schmaltzy middle class appealing hack that could match wits with Spielberg any day. (Spielberg produced this movie by the way and it shows.) More than anything though “Bones” is a lesser version of Jackson’s own early gem called “Heavenly Creatures,” a film that also involves murder, young girls and the fantasy world they escaped to.

This film’s visual pallet contains almost as much darkness as it does heavenly color. Providing that darkness is Stanley Tucci’s George Harvey character, the killer of the girl who dwells in his Golem like layer that, on the suburban outside, looks perfectly normal, perhaps too normal. Tucci brings George to life with ticks, dorky speach mannerisms and creepy hobbies (crafting doll houses and making outdoor traps for ducks) and is certainly a potentially interesting presence of evil. What undercuts that potential is the fact that his evil is EVIL without equivocation or hesitation. By extension, the afterlife he sends his victim(s) to is the AFTERLIFE. While there’s a lot of talk of in “betweens,” there’s ironically very little of that in the moral or thematic sense. The metaphysical realm, full of rainbows and flowers and coronas of white light so bright I was half expecting Gandalf the White to pop out, is handled with such awkwardness, bombast and intellectual meaninglessness that the movie plays more along the lines of a Mitch Abom/Oprah book club selection than a gritty drama. “You are in betweeeeeeeeen” the dead girl’s spirit medium tells Sally when she asks where she is. Another line that had me howling was “We’re in HEAVEN, YAAAAAY!” and I shit you not, that yaaaaay part is in there too. In this Candyland giant boats in bottles (a blown up symbol of Sally’s father’s hobby) crash against mountains while night, day, snow, water, sun and the moon are all able to exist in the same frame. She’s EVERYWHERE, get it? Sally can’t really communicate with the living but in one scene a dead flower on earth springs back to life when the father holds it (what does that even mean?) and that seems to be the dead girl’s only real power and it’s as lame as it sounds. While the sentiments are all Hallmark TV Movie and Spielbergian drek, the painterly onanism on display in the “in between” reminded of something else, something far, far worse. The late nineties saw a unspeakable film called “What Dreams May Come,” another film about dead people prancing about like dandies in a celestial CGI world. I also happen to resent that film because it’s as empty as it is pretentious. The qualities of emptiness and pretentiousness is a total contradiction in terms but that’s what we’re dealing with here.

Okay, so the fantasy is a big fail. But this is really a mystery one could just as easily argue. But, even there, as a murder mystery the film does not fare much better because in this world cops are inept, the mother splits town and the co-lead, a father played by Mark Wahlberg (as guilty pleasure bad here as he was in “The Happening”), sulks in his den, not letting his daugher’s memory go as he growing scruffier and more introverted by the day (which, for Wahlberg, is tough to endure because he’s so low key to begin with).

Just about the only thing I learned from the director/writer on this movie is his fondness for extreme close-ups of fingers. What am I talking about? Fingertips, that’s what. Jackson cuts to them all the time be it characters skimming the dead girl’s journal, other characters skimming the killer’s journal or the killer coldly touching a charm bracelet piece he got off the girl. Yup, lots of finger action for those potentiometer fetishists out there. Why fingers? I have no idea but that makes about as much sense as anything else in “Lovely Bones.”

Grade: D