Nothing more than a glorified after-school special, “Gimme Shelter” chronicles what could have been a beautiful story about compassion, hope, discovering love and overcoming insurmountable obstacles.
But instead of displaying the truth of the characters’ reality and letting the audience feel how they want to, writer/director Ron Krauss delivers a trite and manipulative film that tries to force the audience to feel the way HE wants them to.
Based on their performances, it appears that each actor was given extremely specific direction on how they were to portray their characters. Each facial expression and body movement, even the rhythm and tone of their speech, appears forced.
This may be one of the reasons that Vanessa Hudgens (Agnes ‘Apple’ Bailey) is being so highly praised just for gaining 15 pounds to play this role. Gaining weight may help her look pregnant, but it certainly doesn’t help her become a better actress.
The only actor whose character shows multiple dimensions is father Frank McCarthy (James Earl Jones). The veteran of both stage and screen steals every scene he’s in by simply not being horrible. Nothing in his performance is manufactured. He captures the essence of the character and plays him without becoming a caricature.
Speaking of caricatures, Rosario Dawson’s (June Bailey) performance is the greatest casualty of the film. Her make-up and costume is supposed to make her look like a stereotypical crack whore, but instead, it makes her look like the otherworldly offspring of a zombie and a circus clown. Dawson’s performance is literally laughable.
Poor direction of the actors notwithstanding, another element that makes this movie so superficial is the editing. Each scene looks like it is cut together so that a commercial can be inserted in between. The editing makes sense chronologically, but it lacks the rhythm and flow that makes a feature film a contiguous moving picture. Instead, “Gimme Shelter” looks like a made-for-TV movie that has had the commercials removed. But, on the bright side, when this movie makes it to WE TV––and it will––there won’t be a problem putting the commercials in.
As an inspirational story, “Gimme Shelter” is extremely heart-warming. As a movie, however, it lacks both heart and warmth.
GRADE: C
