Critics Pan Remember Me's Twist Ending

Performances, chemistry good, but ending 'misconceived,' even 'offensive'
By Harry Kimball,  Newser Staff
Posted Mar 12, 2010 11:51 AM CST

No reviewer fails to mention the “shocking” twist ending when ultimately condemning Remember Me, but some have nice things to say about Robert Pattinson and the other actors. Some opinions:

  • This ain't your Twilight-style Robert Pattinson, so "as Tyler, a New York college boy, the brooding RPatz doesn’t bite," writes Peter Travers in Rolling Stone. "But his movie does." The love story is "all weepy drool until the twist ending, which turns it shockingly offensive."

  • Sure, Pattinson "seems to be doing his best James Dean," Claudia Puig writes in USA Today, "which may be a clichéd choice, but, overall, it's a gently bittersweet and affecting portrait." Plus, he "strikes up more chemistry with Emilie de Ravin" than ever graced the Twilight set. Puig is charitable about the twist, calling it "contrived."
  • The " drastic miscalculation" of the ending overshadows the film's other "ambitious" but fatally flawed project of making Pattinson " into the millennial James Dean," Scott Tobias writes on the Onion AV Club. The problem with Pattinson is that "his soulfulness is a pose." Did Tobias mention that the twist ending is "colossally misconceived?"
  • Too bad, writes Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times. "Remember Me is a well-made movie. I cared about the characters." But the "plot's destiny" is "an anvil around their necks." Crypto-spoiler alert: "It brings the refrigerator onscreen in the first scene. It ties the action to a key date in Kelvinator history, one everybody knows even if that's all they know about refrigerators."
(More Remember Me stories.)

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