Movie #99 "The Place Beyond the Pines" (2012)

Occasionally this happens.  You get primed for a movie based on a well constructed trailer and repeated positive reviews.  To your surprise, this small movie miraculously is playing in your local theater.  After sitting in a darken theater for two plus hours, you're only thought is "did I see the same movie as everyone else?".
"The Place Beyond the Pines" lets the story unfold in three acts, exploring the dynamic between fathers and sons. The first act opens with a bang, losing substantial steam in the second act before running out of gas for the third.  Ryan Gosling is a motorcycle stuntman for a traveling carnival.  A brief fling has lead to him to fatherhood and he makes the snap decision to become a part of his son's life.  Unfortunately, this change doesn't fit into Eva Mendes' plan, as she has already moved on in life.  Money is tight, so Gosling soon discovers bank robbery as a career.  So far, so good.  When Gosling crosses paths with Bradley Cooper, act one seamlessly morphs into act two and the movie goes astray.
Act two focuses on Cooper as a cop with high ambitions, while act three jumps 15 years ahead to follow the sons of Cooper and Gosling.   Several convenient happenstances and cliches push the story forward, even to the point of casting Ray Liotta as a dirty cop (if Liotta asks you to follow him to the woods, you say "No, you're Ray Liotta and I know it doesn't end well").  And while the storyline with Cooper is long and drawn out, the third act with the two sons is even more tedious.  The kids are obnoxious, supposedly a product of their upbringing, yet it's difficult to root for two characters that are so douchey.  Through the final arc, I found myself rolling my eyes, ready to yell at the screen "will something happen."  I had no empathy for the characters on screen and apparently my wife felt the same way.  At dinner, we mercilessly picked the movie apart.
I went back to watch the trailer for the film, realizing that most of the content is pulled from the Gosling portion of the film.  I'm assuming that's intentional since that was the only part of the film that clicked with me.  As much as I liked Derek Cianfrance's previous film "Blue Valentine", this one didn't resonate.  It wasn't so much the performances, which were solid, but rather the content.  Now, as a running joke, my wife and I hide the ticket stubs around the house for the other to find, as a reminder of our dislike of "The Place Beyond the Pines".

Rating: 3/10
Movies I've previously seen: 6
First time viewings: 93