The Last Song

Updated: 7 Jul 2010
The Last Song

By Keith Uhlich

Dir. Julie Anne Robinson (US). Miley Cyrus, Greg Kinnear, Liam Hemsworth.

Ronnie Miller (Cyrus) has Georgia on her mind. That’s because this teen delinquent and former piano prodigy has been sent there for the summer to stay with her estranged composer father (Kinnear). While her annoying younger brother helps Dad build a stained-glass window for a burned-out church, dour Ronnie fends off a ravenous raccoon, brushes up on her Tolstoy and runs afoul of the local lasses who peg her as a city slut gone country.

Then volleyball-player–car-mechanic–aquarium-volunteer Will Blakelee (Hemsworth) – the washboard-abs Ken to Ronnie’s skimpy-shorts Barbie – enters the picture. They meet cute over a spilled milkshake, and it isn’t long before they’re doing underwater canoodling, staring longingly at the horizon and making eternal declarations of love.

The Last SongDirector Julie Anne Robinson does the best she can with what she has, coaxing competent performances from the two leads (and a particularly fine one from a world-weary Kinnear) and adding so many soothing, widescreen pillow shots that it feels like you’re swimming through a sea of down with the Snuggle bear.

But this is a Nicholas Sparks joint – the master of mush coadapted his own novel – so eventually there has to be a five-car pileup of melodramatic contrivances: an unfinished song, unsolved arson, cancer, class warfare and newly birthed sea turtles as an inspirational metaphor! As is, ‘The Last Song’ is what the crinkle-nosed Southern belle in all of us would resoundingly deem ‘Trash! Trash! Trash!’

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