The Necessary Death Of Charlie Countryman
Fredrik Bond
The story: After the death of his mother, Charlie Countryman (Shia LaBeouf) goes to Bucharest. There, he falls hard for Gabi (Evan Rachel Wood), a cellist married to the menacing and volatile Nigel (Mads Mikkelsen). Charlie is determined to woo the beautiful musician, even at the cost of his own life. Along the way, he crosses paths with yet another shady operator, Darko (Til Schweiger), and gets high with his dopey roommates (Rupert Grint plays one of them, Carl).

When a film such as The Necessary Death Of Charlie Countryman comes along, it affirms the existence of movie chemistry. Because there is none here between Charlie Countryman (LaBeouf) and Gabi (Wood).
And that is a problem when the movie is supposed to be driven by Charlie’s intense passion for Gabi.
They meet under intense circumstances as her father (Ion Caramitru) sits next to Charlie on a plane and ends up dead mid-flight.
You know Charlie is head over heels in love with the Romanian beauty the first time he lays eyes on her, a picture of grief with her mascara-streaked face, because time slows and his face lights up.
The scene feels faintly ludicrous, though, because the two leads are such an unlikely pairing. Not unlikely in a fascinating “how is this going to work out” way, more of a case of “I don’t buy this at all”.
One-time golden boy LaBeouf (Transformers, 2007, and Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull, 2008) does his earnest best, but he has to work with a script in which one unlikely thing happens after another.
Charlie gets tasered at the airport, lands in a bohemian youth hostel and finds himself with wacky roommates.
As one of the British roommates, Grint puts the family-friendly Harry Potter franchise firmly behind him as he plays Carl, an aspiring porn actor who goes by the name of Boris Pecker.
He leads Charlie further down the rabbit hole after he overdoses on Viagra and creates a scene at a strip club.
Bucharest comes across as a cowboy town populated freely by thuggish gangsters such as Nigel and Darko, who create a whole lot of trouble for Gabi and Charlie because her father possessed incriminating videotape evidence of them.
It is probably safe to assume that the Romanian tourism office had nothing to do with this film. It would not have approved the lame running joke confusing Bucharest with Budapest.
The film marks the directorial debut of Fredrik Bond, a veteran of commercials and music videos who was clearly gunning for an off-kilter, crazy-cool vibe to the film.
Well, he might have partially achieved his aim. Charlie Countryman is crazy without being cool, and all I see is the mismatched couple at the centre of it.
(ST)