MOVIE REVIEWS: “THE LAST SONG”

Holy hosanna! Has Hannah Montana‘s Miley Cyrus been raked over the coals by critics for her performance in the new Disney teen flick The Last Song. (Warning: there are no songs in it.) Disney is opening the film today (Thursday) in hopes of attracting kids who are out of school for the Easter break. It can probably be thankful that most of them don’t read reviews. A.O. Scott in the New York Times zeroes in on Cyrus, who, he acknowledges, “has a certain aggressive charm” when she appears on TV as Hannah. “But acting, for the moment at least, seems almost entirely beyond her,” he writes. “In The Last Song, she pouts, slouches, storms in and out of rooms and occasionally cracks a snaggle-toothed smile, but most of the time she seems to be mugging for the camera, play-acting rather than exploring the motives and feelings of her character.” In USA Today, Claudia Puig remarks that Cyrus “sulks and sneers her way through her first dramatic role.” Lou Lumenick in the New York Post describes it as “the most dubious ‘dramatic’ debut of any singer since Britney Spears.” Liam Lacey in the Toronto Globe & Mail is kinder — kinda. “Cyrus, though she seldom strays from her two primary modes, pouting rebel or toothy girlfriend, has a winning on-screen presence,” he writes. “Ultimately though, the pop star’s bottomless pool of spunkiness isn’t enough to buoy a script that sinks right past ordinary sentimentality to sadism.” On the other hand, Mick LaSalle in the San Francisco Chronicle maintains that writer Nicholas Sparks isn’t to blame. “If he’s like almost every other writer, he didn’t write the screenplay as a cynical exercise, but in the hope of doing something worthwhile. And then that hope imploded with the performance of Miley Cyrus who … has the look and aura of a character actress, minus the acting and the character.” But Michael Phillips in the Chicago Tribune simply dismisses the entire movie as being “primarily for teenagers looking for something disposable to cry about for a couple of hours.” the movie did receive one positive review among the major newspapers. Carrie Rickey in the Philadelphia Inquirer calls it “an effective and relatively restrained tearjerker for daddies and their daughters.”