Wednesday, Dec. 07, 2011

Breaking Dawn

Yeah, I didn't get it, as scores of you reminded me in our comments section. But the appeal of this cinematic chastity belt about the noble vampire (Robert Pattinson) and the girl who loves him (Kristen Stewart) was not always completely lost on me. I love Anna Kendrick. I like Bella's buffoonish dad. Somewhere around the second installment of Twilight, an entertaining sense of self-parody emerged. But this entry, which held within it the teasing promise of explosive consummation, instead delivered soap-opera-level dry humping in high-thread-count sheets. The film's crisis was something genuine — a hybrid fetus sucking the life out of Bella from the inside. Yet the vapid cast of Cullens standing around the old manse made the topic about as compelling as a debate over whether to order new curtains. The birth itself should have been exciting. Instead, the arrival of the youngest Cullen, as directed by Bill Condon, felt like just another anticlimactic piece of this prim, weirdly pro-life, anti-fun saga. This was the bloodiest of the Twilight movies but somehow the most bloodless.