Teen
girls buy a lot of books. Teen boys not so much. That is why so many of my
long-suffering colleagues had to endure five Twilight movies. Lauren Kate’s marquee series could easily be
considered Twilight with fallen angels
instead of vampires. Despite its bestselling credentials, Hollywood clearly did
not know what to make of it. Before production even began, the studio that
originally optioned the whole shebang backed out. Yet, the producers persevered.
Once again, a group of immortals chooses to mope through eternity as boring
teenagers in Scott Hicks’ Fallen (trailer here), which opens this
Friday in Los Angeles.
When
Lucifer rebelled in Heaven, one angel refused to choose sides. Instead of good
or evil, he would only fight for “love,” in the most brooding, Byronic sense.
As a result, he was cast down to Earth, along with the other angelic
fence-sitters. There, his New Agey commitment to love would find a human focus.
Sadly, that spiteful old Lucifer cursed the lovers. Every seventeen years, she
will be reborn and they will fall in love anew, at which point she cruelly
dies, restarting the cycle yet again.
Lucinda
“Luce” Price is that girl. She has just transferred to the Sword and Cross
boarding school for rich and troubled pupils. Price would be the latter. All
her life she has had strange visions. As soon as she lays eyes on the sensitive
delinquent Daniel Grigori she feels like she knows him from someplace. Of
course, he is the Byronic angel, but he tries to play it cool this time around.
In fact, things might turn out differently, because Price was never baptized in
this life. That also means she could be in big danger from you-know-who.
Why
in the world a band of undying fallen angels would lay about a remedial
boarding school is a real puzzler. It is especially baffling since most of them
look too old to be teenagers. You’d think they’d just move to New York and hang
out in clubs like Limelight.
As
was the case with Twilight, the
quality of the starting line-up leaves something to be desired. To be fair,
Addison Timlin does decent work as Price and Lola Kirke is quite engaging as
her oblivious human friend Penn Van Syckle-Lockwood. However, Jeremy Irvine and
Harrison Gilbertson are both dreadful as the bad boy Grigori and the even
badder boy, Cameron Briel. Not surprisingly, the class of the field is Joely
Richardson, elegantly chewing the scenery as Sophia Bliss, comparative religion
teacher and human partisan in the ongoing angelic war.
