Movies From the Hat 7 – #28 – Vern’s Pick – Serena (2014)

This is my 3973rd Review

Thanks to  Vern of Vern’s Video Vortex for this recommendation.

He requested that I review a movie starring Jennifer Lawrence.

“He ain’t a good enough shot to do it on purpose.” – Galloway

Number of Times Seen – 1 (15 Apr 2018)

Brief Synopsis – A young girl meets and marries the owner of a timber company during the Depression in North Carolina and tries to help his business flourish.

My Take on it – I had a lot of hopes for this film based solely on the re-pairing of Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence following Silver Linings Playbook (2012) and was sorely disappointed that this film was so boring.

The pacing was extremely slow and that also contributes to the monotonous way that the film moves along.

Cooper and Lawrence feel completely wasted here because neither of them really has much to do to keep things interesting.

The plot itself gets really convoluted and there are parts of it that they only allude to which makes things even more convoluted as things move forward.

Perhaps the book is more comprehensive in the way that the story is told, but they failed to translate it to the screen properly.

Bottom Line – Really boring film that moves along at an extremely slow pace. The cast feels wasted here because they don’t really have much to do as things move along.  The plot gets really convoluted and there are parts that are only alluded to instead of them being explained properly which leads to even more confusion.  The novel that this is based on is probably more comprehensive in the way that things are expained and if that is so, it just means that this wasn’t translated to the screen properly.

MovieRob’s Favorite Trivia – According to Director Susanne Bier, the post-production of the film was complicated by the need for dialogue dubbing, due to airplane noise during the shoot in Prague. Jennifer Lawrence was unable to show up for dubbing sessions. The producers of this movie tried to buy Lawrence out of filming The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013) for one day, but that proved to be more expensive than the budget of this movie.  (From IMDB)

Rating – Razzie Worthy (4/10)

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