The events leading up to the murder of Susie Salmon (Saorsie Ronan, Atonement) are actually pretty gripping, showing Susie's care-free life full of photography, a cute British transfer student and a pair of loving and adorable parents (Rachel Weisz and Mark Wahlberg). Okay, that doesn't sound so gripping, but she also omnisciently narrates this storybook upbringing, and therefore keeps talking about how she's going to die. Also, we're shown glimpses of Stanley Tucci as the murderous neighbor who devises an elaborate, labor-intensive way to trap and murder the wholesome Susie. (But then, aren't all murders labor-intensive? Am I right?)

But once Susie enters the In-Between, she ceases to be relevant at all. The In-Between is beautiful, to be sure, with blue skies, beautiful sunsets and starry nights, sometimes within the span of a few minutes. She meets another one of the killer's victims, and in between checking in on her family, they goof off and put on fashion shows. No, seriously. And while events on Earth can evidence themselves in the In-Between, Susie doesn't affect the plot of the movie at all. Which means that all the time we spend watching sunsets and fashion shows and giant ships in bottles smashing against a rocky shore, we could have been spending it on Earth. It's pretty, I suppose, but also pointless.

Meanwhile, on Earth, things are pretty fricking tense, which makes the visits to the In-Between even more excruciating. Mark Wahlberg goes crazy, throwing out suspect names to the investigating detective (Michael Imperioli) by the dozen. Rachel Weisz can't deal, so she becomes an itinerant orange-picker somewhere. And boozy grandma Susan Sarandon shows up to smoke cigarettes, set fires and just be generally awesome. Meanwhile, the killer is successfully avoiding suspicion by only appearing dollhouse-building creepy, and not pedophile-creepy. (It's a fine line.) But as the months (years?) tick by, he starts to set his eye on a new victim -- Susie's little sister Lindsey (Rose McIver, The Piano), who grows up from a braces-wearing girl to a cross-country-running young woman before our eyes. She barely has any lines in the film, but she wins the Badass Award for the movie just for the scene where she decides to go into the killer's house and find some evidence. It's like ten minutes of The Bourne Identity, but starring a blonde girl instead of Matt Damon.

Don't get me wrong, the special effects are amazing, especially a scene where the In-Between version of the gazebo where she was to meet her cute Brit rots and crumbles to nothing. But the best things about the movie are the performances surrounding the lead-up to the murder and the aftermath, which could have been presented with zero special effects and still been entertaining, if fairly straightforward. Ronan is a fine actress, and plays Susie with zeal and innocence, and her narration is fine, but keeping up with what she was doing in limbo would have made more sense if she was going to have some kind of effect on events later on. (She does make an entirely useless and selfish visit to Earth toward the end of the film, which I won't spoil here, even though it has NOTHING to do with the plot.) On top of it all, the ending will likely be a severe disappointment to some who wish to see the killer properly punished for his crimes, myself included. I, for one, think that they could have made him watch Susie's fashion show. Harsh, but fitting, I think.

Have you seen The Lovely Bones? What did you think about it? Roll dem bones below.