Grade:  C

Director:  Marc Forster		Released:  December 2001
Writer:  Milo Addica, Will Rokos		MPAA Rating:  R
Players:  Billy Bob Thornton, Halle Berry, Peter Boyle		Running time:  111 minutes

Ratings System

They should have titled it "Somber Without a Cause".  There's about an hour's worth of story to tell, but they stretch it out with a slow pace and "meaningful" tone.  So you get the feeling there is something dramatic and important going on, but there really isn't.

The acting is as good as it can be.  But some of the dialog is poorly written and you can sense the actors having a hard time with it.  And even though Berry won an Oscar, Thornton gives a better performance in my opinion.

A number of characters die during the course of the film, and not one of those deaths had any emotional impact on me.  There was no reason to care.  And worse than that, there seemed to be no reason for the surviving characters to care either.  But they go into grieving funks anyway, for unknown reasons.

The foley artists needed to chill out, there are 4 or 5 scenes where the sound effects are so loud and prominent that they distract from the film.  It's kind of hard to concentrate on the characters and story when all I can think about is some guy in a basement slapping a watermelon to get the sounds of the scene right.

I appreciate what the film makers were trying to do.  The way they let things go unsaid; the way the characters fall into each other's lives as opposed to being forced into each other's lives.  There are some very nice subtle touches and polish on Monster's Ball, but the missing emotional weight turns it into a watchable, but average, drama.

- crocoPuffs