Charlie St. Cloud (Zac Efron), is a yachtsman with a bright future and a sailing scholarship to Stanford University. Before his departure for college, Charlie promises his younger brother, Sam (Charlie Tahan), that they will play baseball together every day until he leaves. Later that night, the siblings are involved in a car crash. Only Charlie survives. Years later, Charlie is still working at the cemetery where his brother is buried and still walks out to the forest every evening to play catch with his ghost. Charlie, to paraphrase a much better film, ‘sees dead people’. Will his gift allow him to save his old boating rival, Amanda Crew? And can she tempt him away from the graveyard?
Coming on the back of his impressive turn in Orson Welles and Me, The Death and Life of Charlie St. Cloud is something of a backwards step for High School Musical graduate Zac Efron. Ben Sherwood, the author of the best-selling novel that inspired the screenplay, may have pocketed more than $1 million for the rights, but just because something reads well in the airport...
As a film, The Death and Life of Charlie St. Cloud can’t rise above its beach book origins. The plot is far too familiar and the presentation is far too drippy. Zac Efron fans may be happy to count the ways in which their hero is bathed in the light of dusk. Non-neophytes will likely groan at the same spectacle and at the film’s repeated Disneyfication of Death.