Charlie St. Cloud (Zac Efron) is that guy in the small town that everyone knows has big things waiting for him in life.  He’s on his way to Stanford on a sailing scholarship.  Charlie decides that he wants to spend a night out with his friends who’re heading out the fight in the marines rather than stay and babysit his younger brother, Sam (Charlie Tahan).  Sam forces Charlie to take him to a friend’s house so he can watch the rest of the Boston Red Sox game, but on the way there’s a terrible car accident and Sam passes away.  Before this, Charlie promised Sam that every afternoon after work he would meet Sam in the woods and teach him more about how to play baseball; after Sam’s death Charlie continues to honour this agreement with Sam’s ghost.

So if you managed to read the above synopsis and still feel the need to read what I have to say about the movie in a hope that it’ll turn out to be that sleeper hit that you’ve been waiting for, I’m sorry to disappoint you.  This movie began as a simply made sappy Hallmark movie that happened to have an up and coming star, Efron, who I think ended up doing this movie not only for monetary reasons, but also to complete some contract which started with his High School Musical franchise.  The film felt so intentionally cliché that I couldn’t help but want to press the pause button every fifteen minutes to take a sigh before I continued.

After Sam’s funeral the story is fast forwarded five years and we see that Charlie ended up staying in the small town of Quincy so that he can continue to play catch with his, now dead, little brother every day.  Soon enough we’re introduced to Tess (Amanda Crew), who’s the girl who’s experienced loss as well in her life (her father died) and happens to be a sailing enthusiast who’s planning on entering into a six month long solo around the world boat race.  She acts as the character that not only draws Charlie back into the real world and makes him learn that he has to move on from his brother and it’s not done poorly, just so transparently that you at no point need to actually pay attention.

However, when the third act comes along the film throws you a twist that I actually never saw coming, or it could be that I stop paying attention to the film since I was able to time every plot point so far in the movie that I didn’t need to care anymore.  The only problem with that twist is that when it happens you start to hope that it will save the film from being completely unmemorable, but then five minutes later when that plot point is resolved the film decides to return on course full speed ahead at making its 8PM Friday night date with the Hallmark Channel.

It’s a film that deserves five-hundred less words than I’ve given it here and that’s saying a lot.  It isn’t mind numbingly stupid, but at the same time it isn’t stimulating in any way positive.

IMDB says 5.0/10

Rotten Tomatoes says 27%

I say 2.0/10