On the show “Hannah Montana” Miley Cyrus plays two characters. There’s Miley Stewart, a normal teenage girl and then there’s Hannah Montana, a superstar pop singer. The genius in the show, and her performance, is that the only thing that changes is her hair. Miley is always just Miley.
“The Last Song” marks the singer turned actress’s first big starring role away from “Hannah” and, in it, acting is involved. Uh oh. Her character, Ronnie Miller, is so much more complex than Hannah has ever had to be that Cyrus simply doesn’t have the acting chops to handle it. And that’s just the beginning of the problems with “The Last Song.”
The film is co-written and based on a novel by Nicholas Sparks. You know him. He’s the guy who wrote “The Notebook,” “Nights in Rodanthe,” “A Walk to Remember” and several other romantic dramas that usually end in tragedy. So knowing that, and having seen the trailer to “The Last Song,” one can easily imagine that the film isn’t what it appears.
What it appears to be is about a young girl, forced to spend the summer away from home with her estranged father (Greg Kinnear). She hates him, lashes out against him but becomes more balanced when she meets a boy named Will (Liam Hemsworth). The two enjoy a storybook romance of epic proportions until tragedy befalls them all.
Being as this is more a Miley Cyrus movie than a Nicholas Sparks movie, it has to draw in the young girls and “The Last Song” does that by focusing on Will and Ronnie’s romance for the majority of the time. There’s an incessant and overly coincidental courting, some way too soon swooning and then multiple fights, surprises and immersions in mud, water and more. The whole thing feels way too good to be true and only gets more incredible. And by “incredible,” I mean it in its literal sense – the things that happens are not-credible. They would only happen in a fairy tale.
And that would be fine if that’s what the movie is about. But it’s not. Something happens and the movie twists away from its pop song infused, bubble gum romance. It becomes downtrodden, sad and actually kind of interesting. However, there’s that pesky first 60% of the film that has already happened.
“The Last Song” will make many young girls very happy and frustrate the crap out of the rest of us. The main characters don’t really learn anything of value, the performances are horribly lack luster, we meet pointless characters galore and the story ultimately goes exactly where every other Sparks story has before.
See “The Last Song” only if your kids are 100% totally in love with Miley Cyrus. If they aren’t, then avoid it. It’s not a particularly good movie.
