(Review originally written at 3 December 2007)
*** This review may contain spoilers ***
Some movies are just as bad as their covers. This is one of those examples.
Chad Lowe was an horrible pick for the main title role. He looks and acts like a strange mix of Austin Powers and Rick Moranis. A lethal combination! Often I expected him to blur out the lines; 'Oh Behave!' Guess he got his advise from his older brother Rob Lowe who starred in the Austin Power movies. On top of that all, Chad Lowe just isn't a very good actor at all.
So what did I learned about John Denver from watching this movie. That he was an huge nerd and couldn't trim his sideburns. Seriously, it sounds nitpicky but I was constantly distracted by Chad Lowe's incredible badly trimmed sideburns. In all seriousness, I didn't learned to much about the person John Denver. Just how he lived his life, all packed into a 90 minutes short TV movie. You can also wonder what makes John Denver's life so special to dedicate a biopic to. If he had not died in 1997, now way this biopic would had been made! He was just a very ordinary man, living a very ordinary life, who just happened to be a famous singer as well. Most of us went through the very same thing John went trough as well. Nothing in this movie makes Denver distinct himself from just the ordinary man, just his talent for singing and writing but the movie doesn't concentrate enough on those aspects.
The storytelling within this movie is incredibly bad and lacking. For instance, first scene, John and his wife are at the brick of a divorce, next scene; John and his wife go on a vacation to make it up, next scene John and his wife have a child! This is not how you make a movie! Toward the ending this gets even worse. The one scene John meets his second wife, the next scene they are married and have a child and the scene following that they're divorced. This literally all happens in a time span of 2 minutes within the movie. How are we supposed to care for the characters and the movie its drama and emotions if the movie doesn't even give us the room to absorb it and let it all sink in. The movie goes boom, boom, boom, from the next scene to the other, without a proper sense of storytelling or development.
This movie really doesn't do enough justice to the artist John Denver.
3/10
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