Stealth Entertainment

Bridge to Terabithia

By Scott Lumley

September 18, 2008

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So while the movie starts out like a little bit of a cliché, it does slowly side into something else entirely. And just as it starts to really develop on this, something truly awful happens. It wasn't even hinted at in the commercials or the trailers for this film and I was taken completely by surprise when it happened. I wouldn't call it a twist per se, but it was a major change in plot and it really shook me up when I was watching.

It was at this point that this movie moved from so-so to pretty good. People rally around Jess to help him deal with his pain and guilt. And what pain it is. Jess practically seethes rage from what happened and he has no idea how to deal with it.

It's worth pointing out that while we really didn't see any Oscar worthy performances in this film, there certainly were some good ones. Robert Patric played a wonderful father. Sometimes he was a jerk, other times he was the solid rock that Jess needed him to be. At other times he was an exhausted dad trying to raise five kids on a broken down farm just barely keeping things together with both hands. I don't know if Patric was drawing from his own experiences or just making it up as he went along, but it felt right and was probably the best acting I'd ever seen from our former terminator.





Hutcherson also does a good job playing Jess. He suffers through the indignities of his young life as best he can and when Leslie comes into the picture he starts to mature. Josh does a nice job with this and he makes something that could have easily been comical and overacted very subtle. Robb also does a good job with Leslie as well, but it's a little too perky and relentlessly positive. Some of the choices she makes are a little hard to buy into. Even her one attempt to be vindictive makes her feel terrible, and she ends up consoling someone who was relentlessly cruel to her.

So while this film is a bit misleading, I don't have a lot of issues with it. It may have been marketed as a fantastical romp into a world filled with fairies, trolls and giants, but it's really a well done coming-of-age story that revolves around a pair of young friends. It starts out rough, but turns into something interesting and memorable by the end. And if that's not ‘magical', I'm not sure what would be.

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