Director Ang Lee's adaptation of author Yann Martel's Man Booker Prize-winning "Life of Pi" feels almost like two films sandwiched into one. In the core, you have the succulent special-effects-driven story of a young Indian survivor of a shipwreck who's adrift in a lifeboat with a man-eating Bengal tiger. Yet wrapped around that is a deeply fried New Age-y/spiritual parable about "finding God."
The first, surprisingly enough, boasts special effects done so well that you entirely buy the unlikely story on offer — that it's a living, breathing tiger, not a collection of pixels, prowling about that boat — while the second is handled so clumsily and is so po-faced that it completely fails to convince, a problem possibly inherent to Martel's source material.
Regular readers of this column will know by now that I like "magic realism" about as much as a lap dancer who calls asking for a date; no matter how good the proposition sounds, you know you're being had, and "Life of Pi" will certainly have you and then some.
With your current subscription plan you can comment on stories. However, before writing your first comment, please create a display name in the Profile section of your subscriber account page.