High School graduate and piano prodigy Ronnie Miller (Miley Cyrus) and her little brother Jonah (Bobby Coleman) are forced by their mother Kim (Kelly Preston) to spend the summer with their reclusive father Steve (Greg Kinnear) at his beach house. Over the course of the next few months Ronnie’s heart begins to thaw as she enters into a romance with local Will Blakelee (Liam Hemsworth) and somehow begins to learn how to forgive Steve for what she sees as his part in her parent’s divorce.

CRITIQUE

To quote from my March 31, 2010 review:

“Here’s the thing about The Last Song. As the movie is based on a novel by Nicolas Sparks (who coincidentally co-wrote the screenplay with Jeff Van Wie) you know going in someone is going to die. Having not read the source material I was oddly more concerned with trying to figure out who that unlucky soul was going to be and after about thirty minutes or so I had that mystery pretty much pegged, not really caring a lick if Ronnie found love or if Steven could get himself back into his daughter’s good graces.

Not that the central narrative is worth that much attention in the first place. Both the love story and familial melodramas are pretty pedestrian, the whole thing playing like Douglas Sirk-inspired clockwork working with such cliché precision it’s actually kind of impressive. Director Julie Anne Robinson (making the jump from television to the big screen) handles everything with a relatively perfunctory sincerity, not so much telegraphing all of Spark’s twists and turns so much as not doing a darn thing to hide them. 

All of which makes the movie fine as a middle of the afternoon fodder for Cable but as a theatrical experience it’s just not worth the price of admission. Cyrus, while better than I expected her to be, just isn’t a good enough actress to hold a viewer’s attention for a full 107 minutes. She retreats far too often into sitcom level emoting, channeling her Hannah Montana alter ego when she should be going for the full Rachel McAdams or Kristen Stewart pout.

Still, she and Hemsworth have a decent amount of chemistry, while Kinnear does a good job of elevating his costar to a dramatic level she maybe otherwise would not have obtained. The first half of the film is hardly as maudlin or as distasteful as previous Sparks adaptations like The Notebook or Message in a Bottle, and for a while there I was sitting in my seat actually kind of enjoying myself.

But once the deathly reveal is made things come to an inert halt and any chance there was I was going to exit the theatre somewhat pleasantly surprised were erased in an instant. The last half hour or so moves with the urgency of a sea turtle crawling its way to the ocean, the climax seeming to take an absolute eternity to make its presence known thanks to the mawkish emotional nonsense surrounding it. 

Movies about death are perfectly okay in my book. Terms of Endearment works so well because its final moments are achieved elegantly and honestly, and even if the viewer knows they’re being manipulated to tears because the emotions ring true most find themselves perfectly okay with that. The problem with these Sparks adaptations is that nothing about them feels honest, their dances with death pure emotional manipulation just for the sake of emotional manipulation.

That’s the case with The Last Song. I didn’t believe Ronnie’s choices mainly because I didn’t believe the situation the screenplay had her ensconced within. Her story was ultimately one that didn’t move me one way or the other, and while many around me drowned their sorrows in handfuls of Kleenex I silently sat there stewing in my own boredom.”

I feel pretty much exactly the same as I did back in March, even agreeing with my comment that the movie would probably work a heck of a lot better at home than it did in a theatre. It does, a lot better, but only because I was able to wash dishes and do some laundry while I played the film in the background. Whenever my attention focused directly upon it The Last Song still more or less annoyed me, and if it wasn’t for the fact I had chores to do I doubt I’d have stuck with it beginning to end.  

THE VIDEO

The Last Song is presented in 2.35:1/1080p widescreen with an AVC-encoded transfer. Artifacting, banding, smearing and unintended noise are nowhere to be found, John Lindley’s cinematography very true to the film I saw back in theatres.

THE AUDIO

Available audio tracks include English 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio and French 5.1 Dolby Digital with optional English SDH, French and Spanish subtitles. The sound design on this film tends to be a little hyperactive at times, the soundtrack music and songs pushed to the extremes while the dialogue floats down a couple of levels making some of the conversations a bit hard to hear.

This was how it was in theatres, and it’s the same with this Blu-ray, so I can’t really call it a flaw with the disc when it appears this was the desire of the director right from the very start.

THE EXTRAS

Extras here include:

Audio Commentary with director Julie Anne Robinson and producer Jennifer Gibgot – Surprisingly strong track that’s more interesting than the motion picture itself. Robinson is a refreshing voice, more than willing to talk about where she things she got things right and where she wishes she could have gotten them a little bit better. She also reveals the numerous instances of CGI in the film, and for the life of me I never would have realized this picture was as full of compute enhancement as it is had she not pointed them all out.

Set Tour with Bobby Coleman – Short featurette with the youngest star of the film as he wanders around talking with various people including producer Adam Shankman, craft services, the makeup department, one of the grips and, of course, Miley.

Alternate Opening (Blu-Ray Exclusive) – Alternate opening to the film depicting the church fire in full. Available to view with optional audio commentary by director Julie Anne Robinson.

Deleted Scenes (Blu-Ray Exclusive) – Five short segments cut from the film none of which should have been put back in. Available to view with optional audio commentary by director Julie Anne Robinson.

Miley Cyrus Music Video “When I Look at You” - I didn’t watch this. You couldn’t have paid me enough to watch this. Sorry.

The Making of the Music Video with Miley Cyrus – Ditto the comments for the video itself. I have nothing more to add.

The disc is also BD-Live enabled.

Inside the packaging is also a standard definition DVD of the feature film.

FINAL THOUGHTS

I’m not a fan of The Last Song. The movie did little for me in theatres and not a heck of a lot more at home. Still, fans of both author Nicolas Sparks and star Miley Cyrus will probably want to pick it up all the same, and if that’s so then this Blu-ray/DVD combo pack is definitely the way they’re going to want to go.