Remember Me - Blu-ray Review

'both leads feel like surprisingly substantial and well-rounded characters, their interactions and personal journeys of reconciliation and enlightenment hooking you in like a Shakespearean tradegy'

Remember Me seems a strange choice for Robert Pattinson. In the soon to be post-Twilight world, you might expect him to try something a bit edgier, something where he doesn't have to play a moping, moody, teenager, with a curse to live through and a burden to bare. That Pattinson's Tyler - marauding around New York, split between his anger at his absent father (Pierce Brosnan) and his sorrow at the suicide of his brother - turns out to be completely different to Twilight's Edward is complete testament to an actor who was once described in these pages as 'a constipated goat', creating here a believable character in a believable world.

Whilst Pattinson is impressive, the rest of the film is hit and miss with, pleasingly, the hits largely outweighing the misses. Tyler and lover Ally (Emilie de Ravin), for example, both feel like surprisingly substantial and well-rounded characters, their interactions and personal journeys of reconciliation and enlightenment hooking you in like a Shakespearean tragedy. As a couple though, something gets lost and the film degenerates into a series of meaningless and frivolous encounters of the 'kooky' variety (she eats her dessert before her main, he is constantly chastised for smoking in inappropriate places).

Brosnan and Chris Cooper (the latter as Ally's father) provide first class heavyweight support and although the Irish-born actor's accent is anything but convincing his strong portrayal of a man in control of everything but his family is a consistent scene-stealer with an argument between him and Pattinson in a boardroom proving a darkly-comic dramatic highlight. Emotionally manipulative scenes such as this though prove difficult for director Allen Coulter to handle and a late development in the life of Tyler's younger sister (Ruby Jerins) never feels as important as the director strives to present it.

The same cannot be said of the film's conclusion which though weighty and rightfully framed and presented as the attention-worthy moment it is, again feels rather like the audience is being manipulated into feeling something which wasn't otherwise dramatically present. The themes of the film are summed up well but by directly relating them to something painfully and tangibly real, Coulter almost marginalises them in favour of a musing on 'it', whilst a more thoughtful and fiction-based final frame may have resulted in this being an even better drama than it already is.

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'a nice enough story, but it wasn't enough to keep me captivated along the 108 minute running time' - Cinematic Paradox, 4/10