And the worst movie of 2009 is ...

... Peter Jackson's "The Lovely Bones."

I haven't seen many movies in the past year that I would call "bad." Before Sunday's viewing of "The Lovely Bones," I had seen 47 films released in 2009, and the only real stinkers were "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" and "Hannah Montana: The Movie." Certainly, Jackson's film is more ambitious and well-intentioned than those feature-length commercials, but that's part of why "The Lovely Bones" is so bad.

Mostly, the film -- based upon Alice Sebold's novel narrated from beyond the grave by a 14-year-old murder victim -- fails because Peter Jackson is its director. Perhaps the Peter Jackson who made 1992's "Heavenly Creatures," a darkly funny tale of murder and forbidden love, could have made "The Lovely Bones." But the studio-backed, mega-budgeted Peter Jackson who made "The Lord of the Rings" and "King Kong"? Not so much.

Jackson never settles on a tone for his movie. Is it a thriller? Not really, because Susie Salmon (Saorise Ronan) tells us who her murderer is in the first ten minutes, and one tense scene near the end does not a thriller make. Is it a fantasy? I suppose any film with a dead narrator who is trapped between this life and the next must be, but the scenes depicting Susie's "in-between" feel horribly out of place and ultimately pointless -- aside from being showcases for WETA's digital effects. Is it an intense family drama? No, because we learn almost nothing about Susie's parents, Jack (Mark Wahlberg) and Abigail (Rachel Weisz), and their long-term, psychological reactions to the death of their daughter are totally glossed over. Is it a rumination on life and death? If so, its message seems to be that Susie was better off dead anyway.

What a mess, made worse by Jackson's continued overuse of slow-motion and his penchant for winking in-jokes. Does a movie about a child's rape and murder need the director's cameo in the camera shop and the "LOTR" poster in the bookstore's window?

The glimpses of Susie's afterlife are almost enough to sink the picture on their own. (The killer's ultimate fate seals the deal.) Susie traipses through gorgeous vistas and nightmarish re-creations of her real life, and occasionally talks to an Asian girl who calls herself Holly Golightly and talks in borderline-offensive broken English. These sequences are beautiful to look at, but, as far as I can tell, they mean absolutely nothing to the story. One perplexing sequence shows Susie and fellow murder victim Holly at play (in the fields of the Lord?), imagining themselves in a fashion show and listening to rock 'n' roll. Susie doesn't meet her killer's other victims until the end of the story, which leads me to believe that Holly only exists so that Susie has someone to swap dialogue with instead of merely screaming at a green screen for the bulk of the film.

If you've read the novel, please prove or disprove my next contention: Jack's hobby of building ships in bottles exists only so we can have a "thrilling" visual effects sequence where pseudo-Susie sees tall ships break out of gigantic bottles at sea as Jack smashes his collection in the real world. Interesting to look at? Yes. Insightful? No.

Susie's fantasy bleeds into the real world as she successfully tries to connect with her parents from the other side. This ability to cross over results in an embarrassing possession scene near the film's end that might make sense if one of the characters involved had been a more prominent part of the story; as it is, it feels indulgent and more than a little creepy.

Speaking of creepy ... I still haven't mentioned the film's leading actor, Stanley Tucci, who plays the murderous George Harvey. Even the film's detractors are praising Tucci's performance -- and he could very well get an Oscar nomination for his work here -- but I'd much rather he be recognized for his fine work in "Julie & Julia." Tucci is perfectly adequate in "The Lovely Bones," but I feel like his comb-over and the cotton is his mouth are doing most of the work for him. He does, however, have the most to work with; another of the film's problems is that the rapist is the most developed, best-written character in it.

What went wrong here? It almost seems as if Jackson himself either didn't understand or didn't like the source material, but that can't be true -- his production company bought the rights. It's not as if the studio came to him with the property.

The answer I gravitate toward puts the blame on DreamWorks/Paramount. It's not hard to imagine a darker, longer, more intense version of this movie being cut down to 135 almost-family-friendly minutes to contractually meet a PG-13. But that answer also feels like a copout; there are, after all, so many things wrong with this movie.

I take no pleasure in trashing "The Lovely Bones"; it is truly disappointing to think a director like Jackson could squander material that has such promise. But alas, he has. If there is one beacon of hope here, it is the ethereal Ronan, the teenaged Oscar nominee from "Atonement" who certainly has a long career ahead of her. If only the movie around her were as lovely.

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For a second opinion, click here to read Daily Herald Film Critic Dann Gire's review of "The Lovely Bones."