Charlie St. Cloud

It takes more than arithmetic to describe what’s wrong with Charlie St. Cloud, but let’s start with a tally. The setup alone includes a dead brother, an absent father, a dead father, two dead friends, a fleeing mother and a cancer-stricken EMT. All exist simply to teach the title character (Efron) that it’s important not to wallow in grief, and that God—this is presumably the same deity who presides over M. Night Shyamalan movies—moves in mysterious ways.

Charlie talks to the dead, you see, although the rules of who, when and precisely how dead are subject to the loose logic of the screenwriters. (The plot unfortunately recalls that of the forgotten Kevin Costner vehicle Dragonfly.) After his brother (Tahan) dies in a car accident, Charlie promises the brother’s ghost he’ll meet him every day for baseball practice. He gives up a sailing scholarship to Stanford. But the fates—unlike everyone else in this relentlessly depressing film—have a sense of humor, dropping a limber would-be sailing buddy (Crew) in Charlie’s lap.

You may begin to wonder if you’re hallucinating, too, as Charlie St. Cloud turns into a romance so gauzy it makes Ghost look like Ibsen’s Ghosts. Even the macabre sight of two lovers spooning in a graveyard becomes an occasion for unmodulated bathos. How many people must suffer for Charlie’s self-esteem? The answer is so contrived and shameless it’s hard not to wonder if the movie is a cosmic joke.

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