Struck By Lightning

By: Amos Lassen

What can I say? I love Chris Colfer on his television show "Glee" but he was obviously not ready to make the move to film and that is too bad.
In "Struck by Lighting", Colfer plays Carson Phillips who is struck by lightning in the very beginning of the film and spends the next 90 minutes talking about it. Unfortunately he just does not have what it takes as actor/writer/producer to carry a film and what we get is a half baked cake of unfinished ideas, mediocre comedy and melodrama.
Carson is a brash kid, a sarcastic senior in high school who after dying because of being hit by lightning looks back at his life. He had had dreams of becoming at editor at New Yorker Magazine but first he had to deal with his classmates in the small town where lives. He devised a plan to impress Northwestern University and he created a literary magazine with his friend, Malerie (Rebel Wilson) and then went on to blackmail members of his class into writing stories for the school paper. He works hard but cannot abide the apathy of his town and he goes at everyone around him and his troubles keep getting worse.
The film has three basic subplots-Carson's literary magazine endeavor, the continued war of incivility shared by his parents, and the boy's interactions with his grandmother (Polly Bergen) who is a sweet woman but suffering from dementia. This is probably why, as a whole, the film does not work-there is just too much going on.
We are reminded of how much we can impact on others and there are several positive ideas thrown at us through the dialogue which is actually quite clever and the ending is unexpected. There are the seeds for a great movie here and if they had been planted and nourished, we could have really had an outstanding movie experience but unfortunately that did not happen.