Winter's Tale: Movie Review


"Winter's Tale" has everything that you could consider for a romance drama film. Magic, miracles, drama, and even some action mixed in. Sad to say, all of these elements never got to jive with each other and what we end up getting is an uninspired and hard-to-comprehend film that lacks some serious heart and soul to eke out even the faintest of emotions.

Peter Lake (Colin Farrell) is a master thief who is on the run against his former demonic mentor Pearly Soames (Russell Crowe). Pearly, who feels betrayed by Peter's sudden decision to leave him, wants him dead with whatever means possible. One day, on one of Peter's burglaries, he accidentally meets the beautiful Beverly Penn (Jessica Brown Findlay). Both instantly fall in love with each other but Beverly has a sickness that is incurable and worse, on the verge of killing her. Peter desperately tries to save his one true love, across time, against the forces of darkness, even as Pearly does everything in his power to take him down - winner take all and loser be damned. What Peter needs is a miracle, but only time will tell if he can find one.

The first five minutes of "Winter's Tale" was like shock and awe for us who didn't know anything about its source material. They definitely weren't kidding when they said that "this is not a true story". We could have ridden with the more-than-usual elements of the film but the way the film explained these elements - not so much. The film struggles to juggle between its main plot lines of Peter's true love and Peter's agenda with his mentor and even the side plots in between. As much as the film felt long at times, ironically, it also feels lacking at the same time. Scenes in fact don't have any emotional engagement or any engagement at all. And the ending was something of a peculiar manner. The only true commendation we can give to "Winter's Tale" is the acting of its two major players, Colin Farrell and Russell Crowe. The others were just okay but we felt that the supporting cast didn't have much material to act out in the first place. Overall, "Winter's Tale" is hard to recommend as it lacks any emotional investment as both a drama and as a romance film.

Rating: 1 and a half reels





Why you should watch it:
- acting-wise, Colin Farrell and Russell Crowe did pretty good

Why you shouldn't watch it:
- the film is a mess overall
- the film fails to eke out any emotions on our end

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