Movie Review - Beautiful Creatures

Beautiful Creatures (2013)

Starring Aldren Ehrenreich, Alice Englert, Jeremy Irons, Viola Davis, Emmy Rossum, and Emma Thompson

Directed by Richard LaGravenese

Ever since the inception of the Twilight series and its surprising success, the movie industry has been hoping to find the next teen sensation.  Beautifiul Creatures is not that, despite their efforts to clone the success of that aforementioned horridly acted vampire/werewolf saga.  Not wanting to delve too far away from the supernatural nature of the Kristen Stewart/Robert Pattinson-starring dreck, Beautiful Creatures shifts its attention to witches,  but failing to create any semblance of story for the audience to actually give a damn.

Most of the actors here are better than expected, but they can't help imbue any sense of urgency or heightened sense of emotion into the languid plot which is, if this can be believed, worse than the good vampire vs. bad vampire (vs. werewolf) malarkey that Twilight heaped upon us.  Beautiful Creatures deals with Lena Duchannes (Alice Englert) who, on her sixteenth birthday, will discover her true nature when it's determined if she will be a good witch or a bad witch all the while trying to make things work with her boyfriend Ethan (Aldren Ehrenreich) who, despite her supernatural powers, still loves her.  The problem with the film is that beyond that sentence, nothing else happens in its two hours.  Sure, Emma Thompson and Emmy Rossum come on the scene and try to wreak havoc while Jeremy Irons and Viola Davis try and fight for good, but they're all infinitely better than the material with which they're given to work.  Similarly, Aldren Ehrenreich is much more engaging that Robert Pattinson and Taylor Lautner ever hoped they could be, but his character's plight of wanting to get out of the Deep South in order to better himself is much too simplistic.

Ultimately, despite the fact that I really wanted to like Beautiful Creatures at least moderately more than the Twilight saga and despite the fact that every actor here (even Alice Englert who isn't all that engaging in the slightest) is better than anyone in the Twilight films (with the exception of Anna Kendrick), this flick was utterly boring.

The RyMickey Rating:  D-