Amateurish, predictable, heavyhanded and clumsy,
but with a good heart

Minutes into "Dragonfly", you realize that this is not going to be a sublime movie experience. The exposition is clumsy, the characters are one-dimensional and the tell-tale signs of predictability are in tedious abundance. Still, by the end of it, I was tentatively moved by where the story takes you, the emotion being severely blunted of course by the heavy-handed, shallow road it took to get you there.

Shadyac is not ready for this kind of material - he should stick with broad comedy (the broader the better) - and the screenplay doesn't help. Costner has 2 expressions in the whole piece, and neither bring out the best in him. The deepest thing in this film is the water; everyone is clearly out of their depth.

I saw this film right before seeing the deeply profound, restrained and masterfully subtle "Monster's Ball" and although I shun comparisons, I couldn't help seeing how this film showed us, very much like "The Lord of the Rings", what can be done with the medium when you've got artists instead of hacks at the helm.