BOTTOM LINE: The film has a good message, but the execution is lost, meandering and weak, leaving “Charlie St. Cloud” in a netherworld where it loses its message in a sea of mediocre direction.

THE GOOD: Teen heart-throb Zac Efron plays the title character Charlie St. Cloud, a young man with a potentially bright future in sailing. When his younger brother Sam (Tahan) is killed in a tragic car accident with Charlie at the wheel, his life is turned upside down, and he puts everything on hold to stay with his brother, becoming curator for the cemetery in which Sam is buried. He forms a spiritual connection with Sam, which becomes all the more poignant when fellow sailor Tess (Crew) shows up in his cemetery, apparently injured. All of these moments lead Charlie to finally discover the meaning of his life. At its basic level, this film is about working out that life is meant to be lived, not be put on hold for someone or something else. A strong scene in the film involving Charlie and the paramedic that saved him highlight the tragedy of Charlie’s life, as he never moved forward after Sam’s death. Zac Efron does an amicable job as Charlie, providing the right amount of grimness and quirkiness to his performance to make him believable. The film tries to capture some moments about ‘life’, and in a few aspects, it does a reasonable job of this.

THE BAD: The overall execution of the concept of this film is weak. The plot navigates in a meandering and lost manner, never really connecting the dots appropriately. Charlie is something of an arrogant older brother, which doubly compounds his feelings of guilt of Sam’s death. But the film spends an inordinate amount of time at the cemetery where Charlie is talking to other people he knows who have died. When you first see this, you think Charlie is not all there mentally. But later, the film suggests that they are spirits he is in contact with, but by this time, the whole point is lost as the revelation comes too late. It also makes Charlie’s subsequent rescue of Tess that much more unbelievable. To think that she survived in freezing conditions for more than three days, and all Charlie had to do was use his body warmth to heat her up is bordering on ridiculous. It also trivialises their meeting at the end of the film when Tess realises that she has a much stronger connection to Charlie than she anticipated. In many ways, the structure of the script seems to be like that of a novel (probably lifted straight from the one this film is based on). That structure works for a novel, but it does not work for a film which needs a different structure. As a result, the film’s good message is totally lost in a weak and meandering plot that does not seem to go anywhere.