The Vanishing of Sidney Hall Blu-ray Review

I love a good mystery film.  There is a general lack of those now a days in a world of superhero and family made blockbusters.  So when a new one comes out I am always more than anxious to sit down and watch it.  Last night I sat down with a new release from Lionsgate entitled The Vanishing of Sidney Hall.  I had never heard of this title so I was going in completely fresh.

Vanishing of Sidney Hall centers around a young man named, you guess it Sidney Hall.  He's a normal young man with a gift of sorts for writing.  He's portrayed as an outcast, yet has people who fawn all over him, the first of many issues with this film.  He decides to take his writing talent to another level and write a book about one of his former classmates who is now deceased. The book titled "A Suburban Tragedy" is such a hit he actually gets nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

Now married to his old sweetheart from High School not everything is going as it seems for Sidney. We see his marriage falling apart despite his emence wealth, and we even seem his disappear and turn into a vagrant burning copies of his book.  As he's is doing this he is being followed by someone who is determined to find out what happened to this once great author.

The first issue I personally have is this film is non linear, it goes back and forth between all these various time frames.  When your dealing with a suspense film, especially one of this nature that does nothing but hurt the film. Its hard to be vested in a disappearance film when you know what happened to the guy.

I will give credit to Logan Lerman, he does an amazing job of portraying Sidney through out the various ups and downs of his life.  I wish he would have had more to work with as you can tell he is an amazing actor.  To be honest everyone in the film did a great job as far as acting, and on screen chemistry, they just didn't have a lot to work with.

The idea, and general plot of the film was good, but I felt it tried way to hard to be "Cool" so to speak. The dialogue was mind numbing at times as was the pacing.  Like I said a film like this needs to be filmed straight forward especially if you want your audience surprised.  Lionsgate did do a great job on this transfer as the film looks great, its just sadly one I cannot recommend.

Overall 2 out of 5 Stars