Admittedly, today’s review was not supposed to be about Charlie St. Cloud.  Due to a combination of a catastrophic scheduling error, misprints about start times, and my own sheer desire to get you reviews in timely fashion, I ended up missing Dinner For Schmucks (my original choice for today) and instead parking it for Charlie St. Cloud.

I’m actually very glad for the mistake.

Charlie St. Cloud (based on the book The Death and Life of Charlie St. Cloud) features teenage heartthrob Zac Efron in a bid to turn Serious Actor, as the titular Charlie St. Cloud, a young man with a passion for sailing.  His father gone for reasons never really mentioned much, and his mother busy taking care of the family, Charlie’s largely left to watch over his little brother Sam.  One night, as Charlie’s getting ready to go to Stanford on a sailing scholarship, a drunk driver hits the car he’s driving, killing Sam and nearly killing him.  His life now a hallucination-filled wreck, Charlie’s the caretaker at the local cemetery, living life around a promise he made Sam just before his death–every day, at sunset, for an hour a day, he’d help Sam train for a Little League competition, a promise that somehow manages to apply even after death.  But how long can Charlie keep his end of the bargain up?  It’ll get a lot harder after aspiring around-the-world sailor Tess shows up, shaking Charlie’s familiar world up nicely.

One part ghost story and one part love story, Charlie St. Cloud does a decent job of keeping down the pathos and keeping up the pace on its admittedly rather esoteric storyline.  Sure, there’s a lot of the standard stuff you’d expect in here: letting go of the past and getting on with life is a big theme, as well as taking chances.  They’ll practically beat you over the head with their cries of “Message!”, but it’s all reasonably well put together and actually pretty believable.

Here’s the really weird part–Zac Efron pretty much made this movie, an announcement I never expected to make.  I expected him to wind up a coked-out wonder who died in a liquor store holdup wearing his Wildcats jersey from High School Musical and that his last words would be “Wild…cats…sing along….”  But indeed, Efron has managed to make the stride to Serious Actor, far surpassing my admittedly low expectations.

The rest of the movie around him is a little weak, sure, riding the Cliche Train like it’s got a lifetime pass (or maybe a Lifetime pass, get my drift?) but it’s not without its charms, and Efron is all the punch in the movie.

Thus, the Screenhead Ten Scale hands Charlie St. Cloud up a six out of ten for a fairly weak movie with an incredible lead performance.  If someone put Zac Efron in a horror flick–maybe with Lance Henriksen to back him up–I’d be there in a heartbeat.  The guy’s got chops, as long as the rest of the movie around him isn’t too soft to work with.