Elizabethtown is so bad you’ll want to go back to radio. Okay, it’s not that bad, but the description is in keeping with this movie’s unyielding melodramatic prose. It seems perhaps that talented writer/director Cameron Crowe was so pleased about having had two of his lines in Jerry Maguire turn into classics (“Show me the money!” and “You had me at hello”) that he thought: “Why not make a whole movie of classic lines?” And so the script for Elizabethtown is overflowing with Orlando Bloom and Kirsten Dunst unleashing epic lines, but the problem is, when almost everything they say is meant to be unforgettable, the dialogue starts to become a little stilted. And it pains me to say this, but Orlando just isn’t as charismatic an actor as Tom Cruise and so he really can’t get away with it.

As well, Cameron Crowe, who, as we learned in Almost Famous, definitely knows and loves his music and got a bit carried away with the soundtrack. I find a good emotional musical montage to be as touching as the next movie goer, but when it happens three minutes into a film (when you don’t know the characters well enough yet to care about why they’re looking longingly out their airplane window), and then occurs again every subsequent five minutes, it can really start to lose its effectiveness.

Overall, I found this movie to be a painful experience, but if you’re looking for a bright side: Susan Sarandon was very good as always!