Remember when I dubbed Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen as the summer's worst movie? Well, Michael Bay has been dethroned by director Nick Cassavetes (the man who spawned The Notebook) and his attempt to take an ethical premise and make it a shameless, overdone, made-for-TV family melodrama that demands you cry and sniffle at ever turn.
My Sister's Keeper starts off with one of the most disgusting and heartless concepts i've heard in a while: Sarah (Cameron Diaz) and Brian (Jason Patric) Fitzgerald's daughter, Kate (Sofia Vassilieva) has leukemia, and neither parent have the DNA strands to keep their daughter alive. Their solution? Conceive a child that can be a living, one-stop shop for all of her needs. A bone marrow? Low blood cell count? No problem, just have Anna (Abagail Breslin) donate her bodily functions to her ailing sis.
Fast forward - Kate is 15, dying, and in need of a kidney. Anna is 11 and has had enough of giving up her life to save her sister's at mother's request, so she hires an attorney (Alec Baldwin, what the hell are you doing in this picture?!) to sue Sarah for emancipation for medical needs and all hell breaks loose for the Fitzgerald clan. Did I mention, they also have a son, Jesse (Evan Ellingson), who walks around like he doesn't exist to the family?
Will Anna win her case? Will Sarah be able to talk to her youngest into giving up her only kidney? Will the family ever be able to go back to being happy? By then, the only question you'll want answered is when this movie will end. For two hours, Cassavetes bombards you with overblown dramatic scenes that begs you to shed a tear, dab you eyes with a box of Kleenex, bawl hysterically, but cry damn it, cry! Instead of reaching for the next unused piece of tissue, My Sister's Keeper made me pull out my phone every seven minutes to check how long this film would drag on.
Instead of feeling for the characters, just about all of them pissed me off. Diaz's Sarah was the most disgusting, devolving into a cold and uncaring bitch who shrugs off Anna's and Jessie's lives to save another. Patric's Brian is distant and in once scene, doesn't even notice that his son has been out all night and has just come home. Alec Baldwin has demonstrated he's got solid dramatic chops before (see The Cooler and The Departed), but he's been reduced to cheezy courtroom showboating. Even Breslin's performance as Anna, as hard as she tries, falls flat.
The saving grace is Vassilieva, the one character even the filmmakers can't sully. She gives the movie its few touching moments - a day at the beach, the flashbacks with her cancer-stricken boyfriend (Thomas Dekker) - but its too little and too late. My Sister's Keeper, an ethical family drama that's supposed to make you weepy and uplifted, but in the end, you'll leave without feeling a thing.
* star out of ***
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