The Lovely Bones (2009)

THE LOVELY BONES  (2009)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Peter Jackson
    Saoirse Ronan, Mark Wahlberg, Rachel Weisz,
    Stanley Tucci, Susan Sarandon, Rose McGiver
The protagonist in this movie, based on Alice Seybold's novel, is a suburban teenager named Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan), who's murdered on her way home from school one day and hangs around in a limbo-like afterlife, keeping a watchful eye on both her family and her killer. Peter Jackson would seem to be the right guy to make a picture like that, but for every scene that dazzles, there's something else that goes flat or seems way too obvious. The credit and the blame are in the uneven script. There's some suspense in the story and Jackson's visuals are stunning, but the pieces don't always add up. (The fact that it's being narrated by a dead 14-year-old might have something to do with that.) Susan Sarandon, looking horrid, plays the girl's boozy grandmother, and Stanley Tucci's suitably creepy as the kind of strange man parents warn their kids to stay away from.