A New York Winter's Tale

“A New York Winter’s Tale” is a terrible film.
It has a lumbering pace, pages of stale and hollow dialogue, eye-spankingly poor CGI and a fruitless conclusion. The film also suffers volatile tonal shifts throughout its 118 minute run-time.

Wrapped together with a waffling disembodied narrator, the film does have some enjoyable moments - including an unhinged performance from Academy Award winner Russell Crowe - but these are fleeting moments and are not worth the price of admission.

Based upon the 1983 novel by Mark Helprin, the film contains many fantasy elements - including a flying white horse, a man who cannot die, the ability to gift the miracle of life and a team of demons bent on destroying miracles under the command of a greying Will Smith, who plays Lucifer.

Yeah, I know.

“A New York’s Winter Tale” fails to ease the viewer into suspending their disbelief - but instead immediately confronts them with a flying horse and a minimal explanation. This clunky approach makes the initial encounters with fantastical elements awkwardly amusing - not helped by the films terrible CGI.

It’s mystifying that some of Hollywood’s most famous - including Colin Farrell, Will Smith and Russell Crowe manage to deliver the dialogue with a straight face. This is not a comedy - but there were numerous scenes that quickly devolved into an unintentional farce and had my screening in desperate, disbelieving belly-laughs. Far from a great starting point for a film that asks its viewers to watch the deterioration of two characters with horrible, terminal illnesses.

The film is filled with examples of erratic shifts in tone - from a heartfelt love story set in turn-of-the-century New York, to characters being saved on the back of a flying horse with shimmering wings - followed quickly with drawn-out scenes in which characters have their necks gouged with make-shift blades.

The creative choices made by first-time Director Akiva Goldsman are baffling.

Granted, Akiva is not known for his directing but rather his scriptwriting - which in 2001 won him the Academy Award for ‘Best Adapted Screenplay’ (A Beautiful Mind). Sadly, the dialogue in “A New York Winter’s Tale” is not exemplary of Goldsman’s talent but clunky and uninteresting. Think less eloquent speeches, more overly-repetitive exposition dialogue.

At times “A New York Winter’s Tale” feels like a charming children's film with the heart of a Disney classic - but this is interspersed with stabbings, throat-slitting, prolonged sex scenes and ear-splitting gun fights. And don’t forget the magical flights around sky-scrapers on horseback (which fails to even raise the eyebrow of a passerby on the street below). Tonally schizophrenic and filmed with a heavy-handed directorial style that unnecessarily lingers in every scene - with perhaps the exception of the films third act which rushes towards an ending that leaves audiences cold.

This film has a faint hint of potential but its buried beneath layers of poor directorial decisions, bad dialogue and the clumsy handling of the fantastical that fails to acknowledge the cynicism of modern movie-goers.

This is easily the worst film of 2014 so far.
Refund, please.

2/10
@JustAaronBrown