Gone Direct-to-DVD: April 2009
By Robert Sims, Special to Hollywood.com
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Friday, May 01, 2009
7. Closing the Ring
Who's in It? Shirley MacLaine, Christopher Plummer, Mischa Barton, Neve Campbell and Pete Postlethwaite
The Verdict: Sadly, Richard Attenborough’s first film in a decade is his worst since 1985’s A Chorus Line. Not that the Oscar-winning director’s solely to blame for this decades-hopping tearjerker — about a woman (played, at different ages, by Barton and MacLaine) grieving for the pilot fiancé she lost in a crash over Ireland during World War II — being such a mawkish Notebook clone. The performances are uneven, with a wishy-washy Barton failing to match the terribly affected MacLaine’s willfulness. Screenwriter Peter Woodward doesn’t just have an Irish lad travel to America to give MacLaine a ring belonging to the pilot — no, he also has to be running from the IRA. And the ending’s so indescribably dumb that it could be right out of Date Movie.
DVD Features: Love, Loss & Life: The Making of Closing the Ring featurette.
Stars: 2 out of 5
KEEP READING: Get No. 6 …