#29 THE AGE OF ADALINE

#29 THE AGE OF ADALINE

Starring Blake Lively, Harrison Ford, Michiel Huisman and Ellyn Burstyn.

Written by J. Mills Goodloe and Salvador Paskowitz. Directed by Lee Toland Krieger, 112 minutes long.

Blake Lively is Adaline Bowman who meets the love of her life when she's 25, has a daughter she calls Flemming and becomes a widow not long after. Then she suffers a fatal car crash, after crashing her car in a freezing river, and is revived by a lighting strike, which leaves her unable to age. 20 years later she becomes a person of interest to the FBI and arrested forcing Adaline to go rogue, dropping off the grid, 60 years before that sort of thing becomes de rigueur for the fashionable modern spy. Now she spends her life separated from her daughter and forced to change her identity every 10 years so as to avoid detection.

Cut to her 107th birthday at a fashionable  San Francisco New Year's Eve party and Adaline meets Michiel Huisaman's Ellis Jones - an insanely rich app inventor - who makes her reconsider her life-style choice and perhaps consider a relationship with him. Trouble is he's the son of Astronomy professor Harrison Ford who just so happens to have been one of Adaline's lovers back in the 1960s.

With an intriguing premise, a good looking cast and a nice eye for the camera, the Age of Adaline seemed like a good choice, sadly it's lacking something, like a soul or a heart. It's all very bland and uninvolving, Blake Lively's Adaline is such a closed shop, so Vulcan-like in her lack of emotion that it's hard to really care for her, plus the romance, which never seems in doubt feels a tad unemotional. The most interesting aspect of the film is Adaline's relationship with her daughter played by Ellyn Burstyn who looks old enough to be her grandmother.

This is slight stuff, not terrible but just not terribly engaging. The thing is there's such an interesting idea at the core of this that it feels sadly squandered.

6/10