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Mystic River

Synopsis

As 11 year old kids Kevin Bacon, Tim Robbins, and Sean Penn are traumatized when Robbins gets abducted and abused over 4 days. As adults, Bacon is a cop who's trying to solve the murder mystery of Penn's daughter.

What I Thought

Anyone ever see Sleepers? The movie with Kevin Bacon as a security guard who gets killed as an adult because he molested a group of kids 30 years before? And then the adult kids now defend the murderers?

Well, Mystic River is so similar to this in tone, cinematography, dialog, lighting, etc., that I got confused for a while. Or maybe it was the butter fumes from my popcorn.

Anyway. The movie is a very slooooooow unfolding of the story of these 3 adults. But I don't really care. Bacon's ex-wife calls him and never talks, Robbins walks around shell-shocked (even if he could keep it together for 30 years to hold down a job, marry, have kids, etc.), and is Penn a mafia boss? I don't get it. I sympathized more with Robbins' suffering wife. And then at the end Penn's wife also turns into some psycho lady. I just don't get it.

What I'm trying to say is that the 3 characters have inconsistencies and weird character shifts that don't jive with what we know of them. It tends to cut the whole atmosphere of the movie.

Additionally, I also don't agree with the Oscar for both Penn and Robbins. They've done much better work, and Bill Murray was at his best in Lost in Translation and deserved it more.

 

All photos and text copyright Ryszard Kilarski, unless otherwise noted. Clip art, drawings, paintings are either free domain or copyrighted by the artists.