August Rush

August Rush is the movie Neil Jordan would make if he were a 14-year-old girl, and an idiot. Bad enough that the film is a collection of magic realist/love story movie chestnuts jacked up on Mountain Dew and conversation hearts but those clichés are then filtered through the mind of Kirsten (daughter of Jamie) Sheridan, who cuts so much explanatory detail that she completely fails to make any damn sense. Rocker Jonathan Rhys-Meyers and classical cellist Keri Russell are brought together for a night of cloying romance. They sire a child and are parted, both to abandon their musical dreams for reasons too ridiculous to enumerate here. Their son grows up to be Freddie Highmore and after suffering grandly in an orphanage, winds up in New York to become the ward of the homeless Robin Williams and his band of sassy black transient kids. Freddie’s a musical genius, of course, and we know this because we are shown montages of the city with the sound jacked up high — he hears music! Everywhere!!! He’s also on a mission to find his parents and bring them together, a feat he’ll perform through pure magic, and on the flimsiest of narrative pretexts. Sheridan ditches any attempt to explain what goes on in the movie for reasons known only to her, leading to a whole bunch of actors doing things that neither they nor we can possibly fathom. Thus what could have been a boring romantic pot-boiler suddenly turns into something monstrous and bizarre, a movie practically dada in its belief in nonsense and commitment to confounding the audience. If you love bad movies, you owe it to yourself to see this appalling travesty. All others are advised to flee screaming into the night. The only extra: seven deleted scenes.