Lovely bones

The world of movies would seem to be an ideal setting for dreamscapes and heavenly visions. For a movie can be seen as a reel of individual celluloid paintings given a greater wholeness through the artistry, technical talents and ensemble efforts of lighting, set, sound and costume designers, cinematographer, director and editors.

A visually mind-blowing example of their surreal, CGI-tinged teamwork is What Dreams May Come, in which a dead husband (Robin Williams) strives to obtain eternal bliss with his doomed painter wife. More recently, Peter Jackson thought he'd have a go at the genre's arts and crafts in an adaptation of a reportedly much-loved novel by Alice Siebold, The Lovely Bones. Sadly, both movies ended up as cringe-makingly sentimental tales of lost spirits.

Ms Siebold's novel may be an ingenious thriller, in which a murdered girl gains mortal vengeance and eternal understanding. Jackson's over-decorated, under-plotted movie version doesn't enhance the credibility of a ghost story woven around a child, not in the way that The Sixth Sense cleverly teased its audience.

Saoirse Ronan, whose soulful depiction of a wicked girl gave Atonement a disturbing intensity, provides excellent flesh for the bare bones of the movie plot. I was prepared to believe she was a ghost in Limbo, and Oscar-nominated Stanley Tucci turned in another sterling characterisation as her subtly twitchy serial killer. It's a shame for him that, in a year when he also shone as the truly supporting actor of a husband for Julia Child, he has no chance of Oscar glory when there was a German actor chewing furniture and stealing scenes for Tarentino.

At least he's able to fortify his reputation. Rachel Weisz and Mark Wahlberg fail to salvage the ludicrous characters of the girl's emotionally challenged parents, and Susan Sarandon can do nothing with the grandmother's role other than ham it up even more than the script might have suggested was dramatically or comically possible.

Also way OTT are the movie's representations of the heavenly settings through which the girl wanders, and of her murderer's earthly cornfield of death. They are garishly coloured, lit too much or too foggily, somewhere over a CGI rainbow between the ground and the sky, where only one other girl acts, poorly, as the dead girl's fellow spirit.

Back on earth, unseen but aware that her presence is felt by her semi-catatonic father, cipher siblings and vaporous English schoolboy poet, she mopes. The killer mopes too and develops a new itch, while her sister gets a boyfriend who's a laughably ill-explained plot contrivance.

Obviously, it's hellish difficult to portray heavenly visions in a mainstream movie.