It gets half a lip for the times it made me laugh, even if it was unintentional
I was intrigued when I heard Kevin Spacey was making a movie about Bobby Darin – Spacey is a good actor, Darin is an interesting subject..ought to be good, right? WRONG!
Beyond The Sea is possibly the worst movie I have seen in the last 10 years. Possibly worse than a bunch of movies I haven’t seen. In fact, I think the only way to make this movie worse would have been to cast Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez in it.
I will bend enough to say that it may have worked as a stage production. In the theater you can get away with having a 50 year old actor portray a 20 year old character. In the theater cheesy dance/production numbers don’t seem so cheesy.
In the movie we had Spacey, looking nothing like Bobby Darin, romancing Kate Bosworth, with none of the charm of Sandra Dee, and it was just creepy – the thirty year age difference of the actors making the 6 year age difference of their characters seem minuscule.
We also had Spacey, whose singing voice is fine but not spectacular, presenting the songs of Bobby Darin. Uh….no. Darin was once billed as being “so hip he never even ate a square meal”, Spacey is a drama club geek. I was one, too, I have nothing against them, but it is ridiculous of him to think he could swing those tunes the way they needed to be swung.
Then we had the dance numbers – not well choreographed, not well executed. If you are going to throw those into a movie they better be good. Here they just made me cringe…then laugh out loud.
All of this was presented in an All That Jazz sort of way – flashbacks while the main character is telling his life story. Kevin Spacey, despite his personal beliefs, has always been one of my favorite actors – even in bad movies he gives a solid performance. This movie is the exception to that rule and is the movie that made me lose a lot of respect for him professionally.
Rotten Tomatoes: Critics 43%; Audience 62%