"We Need To Talk About Kevin" is Effective, Lacks Delivery

My movie reviews aren't traditional, in that I don't waste time explaining what the movie's about. I'll cut to the chase:

That one crazy woman from Constantine gives birth to a psychopathic kid. The entire movie cuts between her life before and after he massacres the student body of the high school he's enrolled at.

I'm not going to spoil any of the movie for you either. What I said above can be inferred from the first ten to twenty minutes of the film. The kid's a big asshole and the fat guy from Step Brothers (to clarify, John C. Riley...Will Ferrel's no spring chicken) performs surprisingly well, given his secondary role as "Dad who means well but is generally oblivious."

The child acting in the film is well-done and convincing, as opposed to in-for instance-The Omen, where the little brat doesn't say or do shit, making it easy as hell to play. The characters are convincing, although somewhat dumb, a term which here means, "in any competent household, this kid would have been submitted for psych evaluation probably around age eleven or twelve." Constantine Woman is believable in the role, due largely to her physical appearance (tall, emaciated women always strike me as very emotionally patient and accepting, and Mom here gives her crazy son too many chances to do right, although in this case it's mostly the fault of the father that all the shenanigans went unnoticed).

The film is well-paced (mostly), and disturbing, but for the wrong reasons. Namely, instead of leaving the viewer with an unsettling feeling, I found myself skipping forward through one or two scenes in particular that only really had one way of ending (surprise surprise, I was right), and spent too much time trying to pull me in. You know that part when a guy's trying to pick a chick up in romantic comedies, and he brings out some long-winded, unnecessarily impressive and ultimately ineffective speech about some dumb shit like his job at the stamp factory or how many genital diseases he's fought off with sheer power of will, and the woman at the other end says, "You had me at 'Hello'"? That's this movie. I was drawn in and involved early on, so the shock-value style that the movie had at times for that purpose weren't worth sitting through.

The other main qualm I had with the film as a whole was its climax. It lacked. That's not to say that there wasn't a decent ending, because there was (until the last twenty seconds, but I'll touch on that shortly), it just didn't deliver. The director drew out a couple scenes that he should have kept short, and left crucial elements out of some sections that would have made them more powerful. Also, the ending is lackluster, in the sense that everything that had happened is supposed to be justified in a big, pivotal realization, which in the face of the rest of the film, doesn't stand up.

This movie is, in its entirety, very half and half. Great atmosphere, acting, good pacing, poor delivery.
If your movie's about a school shooting, I damn sure want to see one, asshole.

5/10