Release Date: Friday August 22nd, 2014
Run time: 106 minutes
Starring: Chloe Grace Moretz
MPAA Rating: Rated PG-13 for thematic elements and some sexual material.
In “If I Stay”, Mia Hall (Chloe Grace Moretz) is a smart and talented teenager whose life changes in an instant. After she and her family are in a head on collision, she is left in a coma and has an out of body experience. Her family did not survive the crash and she must decide if she stay with her boyfriend and grandparents or move on and be with her family.
I do not always watch the trailers for movies before I watch them. I did happen to catch the trailer for “If I Stay” and I will admit that I cried. Yes, I cried during a trailer. Stop judging me. So, going into the real movie I was preparing myself to shed all of the tears. The problem is, the movie is paced so slowly, that I found myself looking at my watch more often than looking for tissues.
A sign of a really good movie is that two or three hours can go by in the blink of an eye. “If I Stay”, by hyped wide release movie standards, has a relative short run time at 106 minutes but it crawls by. Chloe Grace Moretz gives it her all in a strong performance, but it was not enough to make up for a lackluster script and thin story.
On my scale of 1 to 10 with 1 being the worst, 5 being the best, and 10 being the worst again, I give “If I Stay” a 9.1 with an emoticon based sub-ranking of: simultaneously yawning and sobbing.
