Winter’s Tale: Movie Review

Writer/Director Akiva Goldsman makes his feature film directorial debut with “Winter’s Tale”. Even though he has only directed a few episodes of “Fringe” and one episode of “Kings”, Goldsman has written 16 features.  Unfortunately, some of those screenplays include “Batman & Robin” “Batman Forever”, “Lost in Space”, and “The Da Vinci Code”. To Goldsman’s credit, he also wrote “A Beautiful Mind” and “Cinderella Man”, but the only thing “Winter’s Tale” has in common with those two films is a good performance from Russell Crowe.  That is about the only good thing in this mind boggling waste of talent. For the first 20 minutes or so, “Winter’s Tale” seems like it might actually wind up being pretty good, but then we get Colin Farrell on a flying horse and everything goes way downhill from there.

When master thief Peter Lake (Farrell) falls instantly in love with a young woman who is dying from a form of consumption, he has a change of heart about robbing her family’s home.  Beverly Penn (Brown Findlay) has stolen Peter’s heart, but his former mentor, the demonic Pearly Soames (Crowe) has other plans.  Pearly is a force of evil and his job is to destroy miracles.  When he realizes that Beverly is Peter’s miracle, he sets out to kill her. 

One of many major issues with “Winter’s Tale” is that it winds up getting a bit confusing on who is the actual miracle. Is it Peter? Is it Beverly?  Even when Peter is taken down by Pearly, only to show up 100 years later in modern day New York, things are still not quite clear.   I could forgive many of the obvious plot holes horrid dialogue if “Winter’s Tale” wasn’t so damn boring. Very little in the story works, not even the surprise casting of the Devil, whom gives the film its most lazy performance. 

Crowe is the only one in the cast that even slightly registers.  He seems to be having some fun as an evil demon and I actually liked the direction he took it.   I had the choice of reviewing one of three films geared towards the Valentine’s Day weekend crowd and I went with the one that wasn’t a remake.  Not sure if I made the right choice, but I couldn’t imagine “About Last Night” and “Endless Love” being much worse than “Winter’s Tale”.

By: Marc Ferman