Movie Review - The Last Song

by Alex Popp



Do you ever really forget your first heartbreak?

Miley Cyrus plays a seventeen-year-old girl who is sent to a Southern beach town for the summer to stay with her father, whom she hasn't really forgiven for divorcing her mom in "The Last Song" from Nicholas Sparks, the author of "The Notebook."

There she meets a handsome young man and they fall in love with each other. And being in a good mood, she is helped to reconnect with her father.

First of all, this movie is incredibly touching. I have never cried in the theater before since "Eight Below" from four years ago. I will say for the record, you can't exactly class this as a chick flick.

Also, you may be hearing rumors going around that Miley Cyrus can't act. That is incorrect. She made an excellent performance. As a matter of fact, her whole personality in the film reminded me of my sister. And that's what I like to see, as you may have guessed. I'm sorry to break it to you, Matthew, but Miley Cyrus can act. I mean it, she made like third or fourth best performance I've seen by an actress in a lead role (I haven't seen any Meryl Streep movies). And there were other great performances by Greg Kinnear as the girl's dad and particularly Bobby Coleman as her younger brother. If anyone in the movie is deserving of an Oscar nominee, it's him. I probably wouldn't have enjoyed the movie half as much if it didn't have the girl's brother. He was played brilliantly.

I am a guy and I liked this film a lot. However, the thing that made me not love it was that there was a lot of kissing going on between the girl and her boyfriend when they had just started dating. I remember my mom leaning over to me in the theater and she whispered "I probably won't like this movie." But later it just turns around and she agreed.

Rated PG for this sensuality, mild language and some violence. I'd say it's okay for audiences over the age of 10. What surprised me was that they aimed the movie toward teenagers, male and female. Usually doing that, they would brought the negative content to more extreme measures, but not in this case.

Three and a half stars for the incredibly moving tear jerker, "The Last Song." It's one of the best films of the year.

Review by Alex Popp for The Animation Empire blog.