I enjoyed this movie, for what it tries to do. It's not trying to be an art-house Oscar-bait film. It's basically a story about a good man who loses himself to grief and how he recovers. The core message of letting go and moving on is a good one.
It's not a dumb, roll-your-eyes movie and it's not too clever. It sails the line between those two extremes, but manages to do so without being bland. There's a lot to enjoy here: Efron's excellent performance, Tahan's charm and chemistry with Efron, and Crew's solidity. Prew also has his moments, and although nobody manages to steal any scenes from Efron, they were all believable. I wish we could have seen a lot more of Basinger and Liotta, though, and Logue's relative lack of prettiness was actually a kind of relief.
Although the characters are clean, they still do foolish things, loose their tempers, and make poor choices about how to spend their lives. Personally, I'm not as moved by stories where the main character is a self-absorbed, self-destructive jerk who--no surprise--brings pain on him/herself and others and succumbs to the usual pitfalls: alcohol/drugs, meaningless sex, or general idiotic acting out. That might have made the movie "cooler" or made Efron seem edgier, but the story and character wouldn't have been as resonant for me. I can root for and identify with characters who are trying to do their best, to do the right thing, but it still leads them quite naturally into struggling with personal demons.
There's not much logic or explanation for Charlie's ability to interact with the dead physically. It's the conceit of the film and the whole plot falls apart without it, so if you're going to enjoy the story at all, you have to suspend that bit of disbelief. On the level of pushing emotional buttons, this film hits them pretty hard: everything from raw attraction (a nearly constant undertone) to outright laughing (I loved the running gag with the geese) to embarrassment (one scene shows how even someone as good-looking as Efron can fall completely flat on his face in an awkward blind-date situation) to aching from a sense of loss and separation and loneliness. I never actually got close to crying, but I certainly felt tugged (although more so with the Charlie/Sam relationship than with the Charlie/Tess relationship) more than once.
Clearly the main draw of this film is Efron. If you're going for Efron eye candy you'll get it in spades, but happily (despite the many reviews that sneer to the contrary), he actually spends most of the movie with his shirt on, so you have some hope of focusing on his face. Of course, easily a quarter of the scenes where he's got his shirt on, he's wet for one reason or another, so it doesn't actually help much. And even if you do manage to focus on his face, you again have to get past the "Damn, he's pretty!" reaction and focus on whatever emotions the character has. Happily, once you've invested that much effort, you find yourself caring about Charlie and responding to those emotions. The story is compelling because of Efron's acting, precisely because once you get past the pretty, there really is something there. When he finally does get around to taking off his shirt, it's not without reason, so at least you're not left laughing like you are with most of the embarrassing shirtless moments in the Twilight series.
Let me reiterate the part about the eye candy. There's lots of it. And not just the actors, but the indoor locations, the lighting, the framing, the ocean, the sailboats, the shoreline, even the sculptures in the graveyard. There's a gorgeous sculpture of a desolate angel crying on a gravestone near the end of the film. (Although there's a strange moment in the middle of the movie when the camera focuses on a child-angel gravestone for a little too long and you suddenly wonder if the movie is going to turn into a horror flick with the child-angel coming to life and terrorizing the townspeople. But the sensation passes, and you realize how clean the story is. Despite the fact that the main character talks to dead people, there's never a creepy sense of foreboding. It might have been more interesting if they'd taken it in that direction.) Perhaps the plot is a little bit predictable and the surprise twist isn't a huge surprise, but it does hit Charlie's character hard, and Efron and Crew make it work.
I gave it an 8 out of 10, because it mostly succeeds at what it tries to do. One interesting thing about it is that it tends to defy easy categorization. Is it a romance? A comedy? A tragedy? A star vehicle? A story about depression? A fable? A story about mental illness? A story about loss? A fantasy? A story about grieving? Predictable? Engaging? A thin excuse to watch pretty people standing in front of pretty things? Something with emotional resonance? The answer is yes. One thing I liked about it was the sheer variety of emotions that I experienced while I watched it. Small funny things happen alongside small moments of sadness, and vice versa. In that sense, it has resonance that dips below the pretty surface.
