MONTREAL – The consensus is that Robert Pattinson has mastered the James Dean art of brooding as the sullen poster boy for the latest generation.


Pattinson’s heartthrob status has been defined by his portrayal of the conflicted vampire-in-recovery Edward Cullen in the popular Twilight film series, based on the Stephenie Meyer novels.


There was Twilight in 2008, New Moon last year, and Eclipse is set for release, to a great deal of anticipation, on June 30. Breaking Dawn, the finale, is expected to be released as two movies over the next few years.


In other words, the British actor is committed to the Edward sulk for at least another few films. But that doesn’t mean he’s become self-entitled or satisfied with his accomplishments.


His latest effort to expand on his brooding horizons is Remember Me, which opens Friday. Pattinson plays Tyler, a rebellious young New Yorker who clashes with his overbearing father (Pierce Brosnan) in the aftermath of his brother’s sudden death.


Only when Tyler meets the charming Ally (Emilie de Ravin) does he find some peace of mind and a reason to believe, which may be threatened by Ally’s protective Manhattan cop dad (Chris Cooper).


To say that Pattinson as Tyler redefines James Dean’s Rebel Without a Cause angst is not an exaggeration, although the actor expresses some reservations about the assessment.


“I think it’s a fairly typical state to be in,” Pattinson notes of his character’s classic rebellious posturing. “And yes, I think there’s that element, but I was also interested in the arrogant things about Tyler.”


The good news for Pattinson is that he could protect the delicate tone and texture as a producer on the film. But he’s hesitant to take credit.


“I’m kind of embarrassed about the producing thing, because I wasn’t really acting like a proper producer,” he confesses. “I only came on after filming to help make sure the product was the product we all wanted to make at the end.”


Indeed, Remember Me is precious to him, so he wanted to ensure the project


wasn’t modified or diminished in the post-production phase.


“The way Tyler reacted to specific things seemed very relatable to me,” Pattinson admits. “I hadn’t seen a character like it in 100 scripts, so when it came available between filming New Moon and Eclipse, I went for it, because it seemed like a perfect fit.”


He has lots of choices available to him, thanks to Twilight. Before Twilight, the London-born actor was introduced to the modelling world by his mother, who worked for an agency in London. He was successful as a teen and found time to get involved in a neighbourhood theatre group, while performing pop music as well.


Subsequently, a TV and movie agent liked what he saw, and signed Pattinson. As good fortune and timing would have it, Pattinson eventually won a high-profile cameo in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, portraying the doomed Cedric Diggory. Shortly after the release of that picture, he was being dubbed the next Jude Law.


But that’s not why Twilight director Catherine Hardwicke selected Pattinson to play Edward opposite Kristen Stewart’s Bella in Twilight.


“Their chemistry was instant,” Hardwicke recalled just before the release of the first film. In fact, Stewart and Pattinson connected so convincingly, they have been linked romantically.


What Hardwicke didn’t mention is that a determined Pattinson had to endure multiple auditions to beat out more than 5,000 other actors. He has that kind of drive.


Still, Pattinson says he never anticipated the overwhelming, and constricting, attention that arrived with his Twilight role. But he says he doesn’t take roles “that are polar opposites of Edward Cullen,” though he appreciates the change of pace.


Currently, he’s enjoying his against-type performance in Bel Ami, an R-rated drama with a racy sex sequence, due in theatres next year.


“I think there’s a kind of irony in Bel Ami, because a lot of the women are attracted to my character,” Pattinson says, smiling ever so slightly, “and then he kind of screws them over and steals their money, which I think is quite funny compared to my Twilight character.”

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Apparently, millions of Twilight-obsessed tweens and teens were right about one thing: Robert Pattinson does indeed have an indecent level of movie charm. In Remember Me, a sweetly sodden love story with a twist, he plays Tyler Hawkins, one of those sensitive good-bad boys that have been driving women insane since the invention of the sneer. Tyler is a lot livelier than Edward the brooding vampire; he is James Dean crossed with Holden Caulfield. Can you contain yourself? (See photos of the latest Twilight characters.)

The movie follows a familiar formula: boy makes wager he can snag girl for nefarious purposes, then falls in love with her while the clock ticks down to the revelation of his lousy deed and his inevitable redemption. But rather than taking the traditional romantic comedy route, Remember Me is all about the melodrama. Instead of having the usual Manhattan magazine or fashion jobs, Tyler and his girl Ally (Lost’s Emilie de Ravin) are college kids mired in misfortune. They are just 21 but have been through the wringer.

Tyler’s older brother Michael, a sensitive musician, committed suicide on his own 22nd birthday; in Tyler’s mind, it was all the fault of his father Charles (Pierce Brosnan) for pressuring Michael into joining his white shoe law firm. It seems unlikely that the drudgery of paralegal work actually pushed Michael over the edge, but we have plenty more evidence that Charles is an awful father. His refusal to pay any attention to Tyler’s little sister Caroline (Ruby Jerins) seems pathological, especially since she is, like Tyler, straight out of Salinger: wise beyond her years, talented and soulful. Thankfully, the Hawkins’ parents are divorced and Caroline lives in a warm, privileged bohemian household with their mother (Lena Olin) and stepfather. She can also rely on Tyler to pick her up from school. (Read an interview with Robert Pattinson.)

Poor Ally watched her mother murdered on a subway platform by muggers ten years ago. Remember Me opens with this scene, and despite itself — it’s shot in that sort of bleached, sepia light that annoyingly suggests significance — it gets you. Ally’s mother is played by Martha Plimpton, and though she has virtually no lines, her body language and eyes speak volumes. Plimpton is a nice physical match as well; her features link up nicely with those of de Ravin, all cleaned up here from her role on Lost and exuding a soft, sunshiny glow. The resemblance helps us appreciate the obvious psychic weight on Ally’s father (Chris Cooper), a weary policeman who drives her everywhere so she doesn’t have to take the subway.

He’s also cynical and angry enough to break up a bar fight, let the bad guys go, and beat up the mouthy kid who demands justice. That would be Tyler. Hence the motivation for dating Ally: a revenge scenario devised by his roommate Aidan (Tate Ellington), the kind of wisecracking, sleazy oaf that always hangs around the hero in romantic comedies. Of all the tired, unrealistic means the movies use to get characters together, this ploy is the worst. I would rather be forced to swallow the notion of Tyler and Ally meeting through sheer coincidence than watch this unfold.

Yet the movie manages to avoid gagging us with a spoon largely because Pattinson and de Ravin are so lovely together. They are wounded cutie-pies and nice kids, and when they are making soft-lit love in Tyler’s scummy apartment, you can almost forget your doubts over whether Tyler has ever washed his sheets or scrubbed his tub. You just want all the secrets to be revealed, the mean daddies to loosen up and everybody to go over to Lena Olin’s brownstone for a nice organic dinner.

But Remember Me takes itself more seriously than that. It’s concerned with human connections, with the art of grieving, with fate. Big picture stuff. Like the possibility, say, that you could be riding on a train with your boyfriend and the same guy who killed your mother might glower at you from a corner. Or worse. The final twist of Will Fetters’ screenplay has already been revealed in some reviews (there are small clues in the film, but it is obvious only if you, like critics, see too many movies). It won’t be here, although I see the temptation; it’s challenging to accurately assess Remember Me’s merits without discussing whether the end is grossly manipulative or fair use of wrenching emotional material. I’ll say this: if I had a daughter of impressionable age, I’d rather have her weeping over this mildly tasteless romance than the nonsense of Twilight.

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If I were still a 15 year old girl, Remember Me would have been my kind of film. Brooding, broken boy meets intelligent, quirky girl and they almost immediately fall in love. She moves in with him and he takes care of her, while finding himself healed by her presence in his life. They fight, they make up, and then he dies. Touching, right? Well, not really. While the intentions of freshman screenwriter Will Fetters were certainly ambitious, Robert Pattinson and Emilie de Ravin fail to produce any viable onscreen chemistry, let alone the grand Romeo & Juliet love story the roles demanded. While Allen Coulter has proven successful directing for television (Sex and the City, The Sopranos, Six Feet Under), his inability to pull real emotion from his lead actors shows his inexperience in film. Remember Me is at times smart, at times funny, and at times touching.

However, those brief moments are not enough to save it.

Pattinson plays Tyler Hawkins – a young, urban guy who writes in a journal, works in a bookstore, audits university classes because he can’t handle being a real student, and mourns the loss of an older brother who committed suicide. Tyler deals with his grief by sleeping with random women and needlessly jumping into street fights. When he gets lippy with the wrong New York City detective, Tyler gets arrested, and beat up by the police in the process. So it’s logical then that Tyler, whose father is a high-powered Wall Street lawyer who theoretically could sue the trousers off of any lowly paid NYC detective, gets revenge for this brutality the only way he knows how; he starts to date the detective’s daughter. Oh but there’s a twist! He actually likes the girl, so naturally he cooks dinner for her and they end up in the shower.

De Ravin plays Ally Craig, a very normal college student who lives in Queens with her over-protective father. Like Tyler, Ally has also been touched by tragedy – at eleven years old, she witnessed her mother’s murder. After passing out at Tyler’s apartment on their second date, Ally comes home to find her father drunk and worried. He gets angry and slaps her, so she moves out of the house and in with Tyler. While she doesn’t speak with her father, she leaves him messages periodically to let him know that she’s safe and happy. But her father finally locates her, breaks in, and attacks Tyler. After this incident, Tyler reveals to her why he first approached her, she gets angry and leaves him.

Pattinson, best known for his role as cool, aloof vampire Edward Cullen in the Twilight Series, bites off more than he can chew with Tyler’s character. You can’t help but get that he’s brooding: he smokes a lot, he writes in a journal, he quotes philosophers, and he doesn’t smile much. But what Pattinson really lacks in the role is the ability to smoothly transition from one emotion to the next. His character’s persona throughout the movie changes with each other character he interacts with. Of those relationships, the only believable interaction comes not between Tyler and Ally, but with the little sister character, Caroline (Ruby Jerins). With Caroline, the audience can believe that he loves her, cares for her, and is protective of her – this is the true love story of the film.

Sadly, there really isn’t much to say about de Ravin. Throughout most of the film, she’s just there. You’ll understand who her character and her purpose. But she fails to illicit an emotional response with her performance. If you compare her to Zooey Deschanel in (500) Days of Summer, for example, you see that de Ravin has a long way to go before she really brings the character of the quirky, romantic lead to life.

While Pattinson’s and de Ravin’s performances fall flat, Remember Me does have some wonderful moments from the supporting characters. Chris Cooper plays his part as Ally’s angry father perfectly. Pierce Brosnan steps out of his James Bond persona (or at least his Bond diction) to play Charles Hawkins, high powered lawyer who shows his love for his family through what he provides for them, and not through the time he spends with them. Tate Ellington brings snippets of comic relief to the film in his role as Tyler’s asshole, but puppy-dog like roommate, Aiden. Some of the best and smartest writing in the film is showcased by Aiden’s quippy dialogue.

The standout performance in the film was that of Jerins, playing Caroline Hawkins. Caroline, like Tyler, lost her eldest brother to suicide, her father generally ignores her, and the girls at school tease her for being “weird” and even go so far as to maliciously cut off her hair at a slumber party. Jerins brings just the right amount of innocence and world-weary poise to the role that makes her character’s feelings both touching and believable.

The problem with Remember Me is not just the limp performances given by Pattinson and de Ravin, the movie seems to jump forward through time without giving the audience time to grasp the emotional growth in their relationship. Just because the characters cuddle a bit on the train or she tackles him on the beach doesn’t automatically translate into everlasting love. But even that misstep in the script was not the real problem here. The sheer amount of drama (or melodrama) that screenwriter Fetters and director Coulter wants the audience to embrace is what ultimately dooms the film. There’s suicide, familial estrangement, murder, more familial estrangement, middle-school Mean Girls-esque torture, police brutality, alcoholism, assault, the typical “you lied to me” fight that movie relationships pride themselves on, and an ending I won’t give away but made me repeat the refrain W.T.F. in my head several times. (You’ve probably already heard about the ending, but really, they HAD to go there?) Sure the ending of the film will evoke an emotional response, but not because you’re invested in the characters or the story.

Had Remember Me been blessed with some solid editing, better acting, more focus, or killed it’s main character in a different way, it might have been a much better film (possibly even great). Instead it attempted to capitalize on the fame of Robert Pattinson, and billed itself as a much better movie than it actually is. Had Pattinson not had the ability to bring his Twilight fans to the theatres (other 15 year old girls, who will, I’m sure, adore it), this film probably would have gone straight to DVD.

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Astute minds are guiding Robert Pattinson’s career. Segueing from his vampire role in the “Twilight” franchise, he’s transitioned into tortured, misunderstood young man mode.

In the summer of 2001, moody, rebellious Tyler Hawkins (Pattinson) is still haunted by the fact that his idolized older brother committed suicide on his 22nd birthday, a tragedy that split his wealthy Park Avenue family. While Tyler has reached an understanding with his now re-married mother, Diane Hirsch (Lena Olin), and adores his 11 year-old sister Caroline (Ruby Jerins), he’s still at odds with his frosty, Wall Street lawyer father, Charles Hawkins (Pierce Brosnan). In fact, 21 year-old Tyler’s only friend seems to be his loud, obnoxious, thoroughly irritating roommate, Aiden (Tate Ellington).

After a night of carousing with Aiden, culminating in a misunderstanding in a back street in Greenwich Village, Tyler’s roughed-up, cuffed and put in a holding-cell overnight by NYPD Sgt. Neil Craig (Chris Cooper). Later, Aiden spots Sgt. Craig dropping off his daughter, Ally (Emilie de Ravin from “Lost”), at NYU and talks Tyler into dating her out of revenge. Ally lives in working-class Queens with her widower father; neither of them has recovered from her mother’s brutal murder on a subway platform which Ally witnessed years earlier.

Love happens – but it’s not easy for Tyler and Ally, two grief-laden young adults. And it leads up to a maudlin, melodramatic conclusion in the Twin Towers on September 11th.

Screenwriter Will Fetters and director Allen Coulter obviously had memories of Nicolas Ray’s “Rebel Without a Cause” (1965) in mind here, envisioning Pattinson as this generation’s James Dean. Executive producing as well as propelling the narrative, Pattinson doesn’t disappoint in the moodiness department; he’s conquered that plateau, while spunky Australian actress Emilie de Ravin, who endured six seasons on “Lost,” exudes remarkable versatility. Chris Cooper and Pierce Brosnan deliver stalwart support.

On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “Remember Me” is a romantic, angst-ridden 6, rated PG-13 and specifically aimed at Pattinson’s young female fans whose parents won’t be happy that he chain-smokes on-screen.

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There comes a time in everyone’s life when you think, “What the hell is all of this for?” That desk job or college class seem completely pointless on the path to living a fruitful existence. Ghandi would agree. Remember Me is another reminder that life is a blur, so start brooding. People take pictures or blog to document any so-called significant events. We are all in search of some way to leave a meaningful legacy. With a moving cast and a dash of realism, director Allen Coulter manages to make a lasting impression.In Remember Me, New York shines in its 2001 glory. The protagonist Tyler Hawkins (Robert Pattinson), a twentysomething student, is a dreamboat without a cause. His pessimism fuels meaningless one-night stands and a broken relationship with his Wall Street businessman father (Pierce Brosnan). After he meets a just-as-confused classmate, Ally Craig (Emilie de Ravin), he is able to focus on smiling every once in a while. During one of their first dinners together Ally says she’s seen this scene a hundred times. But she doesn’t realize that Tyler is waiting to release just as many secrets as she is. There are so many romantic dramas that climax at an “Oh, I should have probably told you this before” moment. Well, this one has more moving layers and twists.

Each character has an affective representation. Pattinson left his Twilight fangs at home and begs to be taken seriously. This film shows more of his acting abilities, and yes, they do exist. He is dark spirited and death obsessed like a vampire, yet Tyler has a range of erratic qualities. His character’s relationship with his sister Caroline, played by the talented Ruby Jerins, is reminiscent of J.D. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield. The siblings meet in Central Park and wander to hide from a broken home. Caroline’s adolescence shows the horrifyingly realistic social interactions among young girls. Mr. Hawkins and Ally’s father (Chris Cooper) are the epitome of lonesome workaholics who are lost in the same world as their children. The characters reveal a haunting look at human behavior.

Coulter wants to represent realistic lives. The raw characters are living in equally realistic settings. From Mr. Hawkins’ sterile office to Tyler’s grimy apartment, Coulter oozes a modern realism. The only moments when this changes are during the opening flashbacks and when Tyler and Ally get intimate. Coulter probably had to throw in a couple lens flare lovemaking scenes for the Twilight fans.

It would have been too easy for Coulter to make a romantic drama with a star like Pattinson. Still, he delivers a far more intriguing film with genuine performances and poignant hints of realism. Remember Me is definitely memorable. It is another reminder to live your life so you aren’t forgotten. | Alice Telios

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I wanted to see “Remember Me” because of rumors surrounding lead actor Robert Pattinson. I get daily updates on all things James Bond (yes, I’m that much of a geek), and a couple months ago I started hearing that Pattinson wanted to play the infamous assassin. I was not pleased. Who was this young upstart vampire that thought he was good enough to play the ultimate leading man? Having avoided the Twilight films like the plague, this rumor drove me to see “Remember Me,” to judge for myself whether Pattinson could one day play the great James Bond.

Set in the early 2000s, “Remember Me” chronicles the life of Tyler Hawkins (Pattinson), a foundering college student who smokes excessively and journals to his dead older brother. When he isn’t brooding, he’s spending time with his younger sister Caroline (Ruby Jerins) or chasing meaningless relationships with his roommate Aidan (Tate Ellington). Following a drunken fight, he mouths off to Police Sergeant Neil Craig (Chris Cooper) and winds up in jail. After his dad, Charles (Pierce Brosnan) bails him out, Aidan convinces Tyler to get back at Sergeant Craig through his daughter, a fellow student named Ally (Emilie de Ravin). But while the relationship starts as a dare, it quickly blossoms into something more. And as characters reveal their pasts it threatens to tear their young love apart.

Director Allen Coulter and cinematographer Jonathan Freeman have worked together in the past, and their visions click. Fade-outs are used a little too often, but other than that the film is well-shot and edited.

The film’s story and writing aren’t bad. Will Fetters wrote the screenplay after a confrontation of his own landed him in prison and ended his dreams of attending a top tier law school. But his own experience doesn’t flow into the confrontation with the power he intended. Instead, Patterson’s Tyler gets involved in the brawl without really showing why. And nothing in the character upholds Tyler as being the type of guy that would go out of his way to break up a fight. Another weakness is Ally and Tyler’s meeting, which is more awkward than cute, and left me wondering how they even got to date one, let alone moved beyond that.

Fetters’ strength lies in character quirks. Each character has some issue they can’t shake due to the tragedy in their lives. Ally won’t ride on the subway because she witnessed her mother’s murder at a subway station. Tyler smokes and writes to his brother excessively. Caroline daydreams. Both fathers deal with their grief in somewhat cliché manners, delving into work and alcohol, but based on the trauma that Fetters puts his characters through its acceptable. In addition, he lets action speak without adding unnecessary dialogue.

And there’s a lot of action. “Remember Me” is a violent, passionate film, with many characters lashing out physically from grief and anger. The film teetered on being melodramatic, after a dark beginning paints the characters in a pitiable rather than relatable light. Thankfully this changes in the end, as the film depicts events we can all relate to. The film’s ending should work for most late-teens, college students and recent graduates, who have grown up during the historical events it depicts.

The highlights for me were Brosnan as a distant father struggling to cope with the loss of his son, and Jerins as an adorable younger sister.

Despite the melodrama, the film has a lot of strong moments, and the dialogue and acting are solid. And scenes between Pattinson and Brosnan showed that while not worthy of the 007 title, the young star has ability. Rumors are now circulating about Sam Worthington as Bond, but unless his upcoming “Clash of the Titans” performance is better than the one he gave in “Avatar,” I’ll be dead set against him for the part. Why can’t more young upstarts be like Zac Efron and hope to play a Bond villain? That I could stomach.

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Due to a major spoiler in the review, it has been placed under the cut!

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Good start – ruth

 A soft, quiet film. No one to hate or dislike. Just a small group of people trying to cope with their problems and lives. Love is for everyone if they open their hearts. Pattinson is moving up the ladder. He is so very obviously more than Edward Cullen. A real talent if everyone can put aside Twilight mania. I personally think his casting in Water for Elephants is perfect. The rest of the cast are top-notch. A lovely little film.

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Thank you pocketvenus10 from Rob’s IMDB message board!

In “Remember Me” love means never having to say you’re sorry, particularly to the audience. The star, as if you didn’t know, is Robert Pattinson, the moody vampire heartthrob from the “Twilight” series, a conceivably promising, certainly watchable actor in need of an immediate acting intervention. Along with working double time as one of the movie’s executive producers and its biggest bait, he plays Tyler, a dreary melancholic who poses and broods in this lugubrious romance cum family melodrama about a boy (sad) and a girl (also sad) who heal (eventually) while steaming up the sheets (discreetly). Along the way, many people die but few matter: most are just part of the warm-up act as well as the means to a shamelessly exploitative end.Director Allen Coulter could have done to improve Will Fetters’s absurdly contrived, yakky script about love and loss, largely set in the summer of 2001. But Mr. Coulter doesn’t help matters by infusing the movie with grave self-importance. Everything comes weighted in significance, from the way Tyler furiously smokes his cigarettes to the camera movements that carefully show off the squalor in which this scion of a wealthy family has chosen to settle. The apartment actually looks pretty normal for a college boy flopping in a New York tenement. But as the camera lingers over the grimy paint, you know you’re meant to grasp something meaningful about Tyler’s alienation from his bourgeois, better-painted background. Mostly, you admire the cinematographer Jonathan Freeman’s handiwork. Mr. Freeman also shot “Hollywoodland,” the first feature by Mr. Coulter, who has a string of directing credits for HBO shows like “The Sopranos.” Mr. Coulter has talent — individual scenes in “Remember Me” have energy, as do a few of the performances — but his hand can be as heavy as stone. There are few light or casual moments, nothing to cut through the portentous air that settles onto the story in the first scene: in 1991, the young Ally Craig (Caitlyn Paige Rund) watches the murder of her mother (an uncredited Martha Plimpton) on a subway platform during a mugging, thereby bearing witness to horror, a function she repeats at the finish.

By the time Ally fulfills her narrative purpose she will have blossomed into a college student ripe for the heartstring plucking (a sympathetic Emilie de Ravin). The pickup artist who does the honors is, of course, Tyler, who asks her out at the urging of his obnoxious roommate, Aidan (Tate Ellington, persuasively irritating). Love blooms despite the flapping of parental hands and mouths, including those of Chris Cooper as Ally’s working-stiff father and Pierce Brosnan as Tyler’s power-lawyer big daddy. Mr. Pattinson shoots Mr. Brosnan a lot of dark, hurting looks, but does his best work with Ruby Jerins, an appealing child actress who plays his sister, Caroline. When they’re together, Mr. Pattinson actually seems happy to be on screen: better yet, he doesn’t pull a James Dean Lite, he delivers.

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The Twilight boy and the Lost girl get together in Manhattan. But rather than untold years of sequels and episodes, says Kimberly Gadette, this tedious exercise only seems like a never-ending tale.

According to Aristotle, “The whole is more than the sum of its parts.” Yet with Remember Me, the whole is reduced to less. But then again, if less is more, then what we’ve got is one hell of a mess of less.

Even with some strong acting, some lovely early repartee between the leads and a decent portrayal of a fractured father/son relationship, the positives are trampled by the heavy boots of poor plot points, a trumped-up third act conflict and an emotionally exploitative ending that is, quite simply, appalling.

A romantic drama in which boy doesn’t so much meet girl as he is egged on by a roommate, the film examines two disparate families trying to recover from personal tragedy. Pattinson’s Tyler still addresses his journal entries to his deceased older brother six years after the brother’s suicide, continuing to point the blame at his distant, high-powered attorney father (Pierce Brosnan’s Charles). He audits classes at NYU rather than formally enrolling, which aptly reflects his desire to hang out at the perimeter of his life rather than fully engage. Which is the exact opposite of Emilie de Ravin’s Ally, a serious-minded co-ed who is dedicated to her studies and her overprotective policeman dad (Chris Cooper’s Neil). Existing in the shadow of her mother’s murder on a Brooklyn subway platform ten years earlier, Ally still chooses to live at home, holding tight to her tiny shred of a family.

Perhaps because director Allen Coulter is more experienced with HBO television (The Sopranos, Sex and the City, Nurse Jackie) than features (he previously directed Hollywoodland), the pacing is problematic. Which is confounding, since it would seem that a faster television format would spur a snappier rhythm rather than a slog. One long, soulful close-up of Tyler follows a slow pan to Ally, followed by another lugubrious shot of Tyler – and yes, he’s pained once again. Pattinson fares better when playing opposite his baby sister (marvelous young actor Ruby Jerins), the fun-loving roommate Aidan (an engaging Tate Ellington) or during the final confrontation with his dad – one of the only scenes that catches true fire.

As Ally, de Ravin portrays a credible tough girl, self-possessed and grounded, bringing a wide-eyed honesty to the work. She’s a good foil for Mr. Tall, Dark and Pouty, bringing him down a peg or two, instinctively knowing how to cut through his angst with a few playful jabs. Freed from his ghostly white pallor, Pattinson’s Tyler tries to keep his devil-may-care bad boy act together – yet still allowing us glimpses of a lighter, more vulnerable young man. He’s been stuck in moody drama for most of his career – it remains to be seen if he might be able to change up his persona a bit, perhaps with a clever modern comedy.

The scene stealer here is Brosnan, depicting a wider character range than usual, hearkening back to his well-received performance in 2005’s The Matador. Glad to see you again, Mr. Brosnan.

Credible-to-strong acting aside, the film’s primary derailing comes at the hand of screenwriter Will Fetters, who throws logic directly under a string of subway cars. In the first scene, the mom (an uncredited Martha Plimpton) doesn’t resist as the muggers divest her of her belongings. Once the subway pulls into the station, the thieves jump on the train and the doors close. Whew – she’s alive. Then, suddenly, inexplicably, the doors reopen, the muggers calmly raise their guns and blow the mom away. So … they changed their minds and lucky for them, the Subway Gods decided to help them out? It’s an illogical cheap trick, orchestrated to surprise us.

You think that’s bad? Oh, but we are mere lambs being led to slaughter…

Other missteps: Tyler’s loving family insists on having a party to celebrate his 22nd birthday – even though the beloved brother hung himself on his 22nd birthday. The machination of having Tyler “pushed” into dating Ally – supposedly to get back at her policeman father – is ridiculous, a weak construct meant to manufacture an all-too predictable rift in the third act. Meanwhile, such issues as Cooper’s inappropriately aggressive cop, or Tyler’s little sister who frequently “spaces out” are never explored. Or the fact that Cooper’s veteran detective doesn’t lift a finger to find his daughter, even though he’s frantic with worry – until some fellow cop happens to see her with Tyler months later on, you guessed it, the subway.

If only the filmmakers had invested as much effort into creating a credible story as they had in setting up the grotesque hat trick of an ending, there might have been something worth remembering. As it stands: we can’t forget Remember Me fast enough.

Rating on a scale of 5 cases of short-term memory: 3 for the acting, 0 for the story = 1.5

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Tragedy looms over Remember Me, an obvious yet sweet romantic drama set in New York during the summer of 2001.

Robert Pattinson, best-known as Edward Cullen in the Twilight series, ditches the designer duds and makeup-induced pallor of his eternal heartthrob for the flannel shirts and scruffy half-beard of 21-year-old rebel poet Tyler Hawkins.

The son of a powerful Wall Street lawyer (Pierce Brosnan), Tyler spends his days hanging out at the library and auditing classes at New York University.

He doesn’t get along with Dad – the result of a family calamity that neither has adequately faced.

The character is immediately recognizable – Pattinson even smokes cigarettes as if he just finished watching a James Dean tribute – but the actor manages to make Tyler more than a cliche, displaying an unaffected charm last glimpsed when he played Cedric Diggory in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.

In the film’s most self-consciously funny moment, Tyler’s no-filter roommate (Tate Ellington) tells him: “Enough of this brooding-introvert (stuff).”

Indeed, the young man’s mood lightens considerably after meeting Ally (Emilie de Ravin), a fiery student whose own life was affected by the sudden loss of her mother.

There is much to like in Remember Me. For starters, the movie aspires to be more than a skin-deep romance with strikingly beautiful leads. Even though Tyler’s deepest musings (often conveyed in voice-over) are more puerile than profound, the relationship between the scribe and his eventual muse is cute and honest.

Unfortunately, director Allen Coulter (the underappreciated Hollywoodland) never achieves a consistent storytelling tone.

Genuine moments are undermined by lazy exchanges in which characters could end conflicts if they only spoke their minds or asked logical questions (de Ravin is a veteran of such scenarios on Lost).

A complicated subplot in which Tyler was once arrested by Ally’s father goes nowhere slowly – existing only to trigger the inevitable second-act breakup.

The casting is also oddly scattershot.

De Ravin, a native Australian, convincingly plays the daughter of a Queens cop (Chris Cooper) and shows real promise as a leading lady. Pattinson, a Londoner, also looks and sounds authentic.

On the other hand, to learn that Brosnan’s bad dad hails from Brooklyn is completely surprising. So that’s the accent that the Irish actor was attempting.

By the time the story wraps up in September, the viewer has been repeatedly told to “live in the moment.” The future, after all, offers no guarantees.

The lesson is one taught many times by the movies.

Remember Me is slightly more memorable than most.

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“Remember Me” is a movie with an urgent message. The message is: Please consider seeing another movie. Up until the very end, when it takes a plot turn so contemptible you feel like spitting at the screen, the picture is a meandering glum-love exercise that never seems to be going anywhere. Its only goal is to make it to that dreadful wrap-up, which it hopes to pass off as tragic irony. It’s a movie with no shame, or much of anything else.

Robert Pattinson, broody as usual, plays Tyler Hawkins, an NYU student whose lust for knowledge is so unbounded that he simply audits various courses, undecided about a major. “I’m undecided,” he tells fellow student Ally Craig (Emilie de Ravin). “About what?” the script forces her to ask. “Everything,” he says, broodingly. Tyler and Ally are united by past sadness. Her mother was murdered before her eyes during a subway assault 10 years earlier (that would be 1991 — keep the math in mind). He had a brother who hanged himself. Now he suffers the glowering disapproval of his father (Pierce Brosnan), a Wall Street titan with a dubious tan, and dotes on his precocious little sister (Ruby Jerins), a private-school moppet who lives with their remarried mother (Lena Olin). 

Tyler and Ally have something else in common: her father (Chris Cooper), a veteran cop with whom she resides in blue-collar Queens. After Tyler and his astonishingly obnoxious roommate, Aidan (the grating Tate Ellington), are involved in a street fight, it’s Ally’s dad who shows up to arrest them. When Aidan makes the connection between father and daughter, he dares Tyler to hit Ally up for a date. You know where this shopworn plot point will lead, but before it does we’re treated to some summery Central Park rambling, some brief PG-13 sex that’s only marginally hotter than the listless nuzzling in the “Twilight” films, and a pair of Tyler freakout scenes — in his sister’s school and his dad’s corporate boardroom — that set new standards for awkward staging and general cinematic embarrassment. (This is director Allen Coulter’s second film; his first was the 2006 “Hollywoodland.”)

Emilie de Ravin is expressive beyond the call of the script (by first-timer Will Fetters), Ruby Jerins is a child actor of rare charm, and Brosnan, Cooper and Olin are of course all pros. Whether Pattinson will ever fully emerge from the cocoon of teen celebrity remains to be seen; this movie isn’t the vehicle that would encourage him to do so. As the picture builds — well, slogs along — we can feel the fingers of fate tightening: Tyler carries around a book about Greek mythology; he’ll soon turn 22 — the same age his brother was when he died. Finally, the summer of 2001 shades into September, and before long we’re asked to accept the deaths of nearly 3,000 people as a backdrop for the cheapest sort of tear-jerking. This deplorably facile device is all that most viewers are likely to remember from the film, and not fondly.

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Robert Pattinson playing a contemporary, brooding and lost young man in Remember Me shows that he has more range than is visible in his one-dimensional role as a sexy vampire. 

It may strike some Twilight fans as heresy, but he strikes up more chemistry with Emilie de Ravin than he does with Twilight love interest, and purported real-life girlfriend, Kristen Stewart. 

Remember Me is a touching love story, but its broader tale of familial relations packs a greater emotional punch. Elements of the story come off as contrived, with unlikely coincidences linking more realistic moments. 

Pattinson plays Tyler, an New York University student with a turbulent relationship with his arrogant and emotionally distant father (Pierce Brosnan), a powerful attorney. 

Pattinson serves as co-executive producer of the film, which is most interesting as a study in loss, grief and resolution. 

He seems to be doing his best James Dean, which may be a clichéd choice, but, overall, it’s a gently bittersweet and affecting portrait. 

When he has a interview with MTV Radio,he talked about bully things when he’s younger. 

‘A lot of people, when I was younger. I was a bit of an idiot, always unprovoked — in my eyes, anyways.’ 

‘It was after school, generally. Like, after I first started acting and I liked to behave like an actor — or what I thought was an actor — it generally provoked a lot of people into hitting me.’ 

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I’ve been rough on the “Twilight” films in print so far, and that new trailer for “Eclipse” looks like a whole lot of the same, but just because someone’s in one of those films, or involved in one of those films, I’m not the sort of person who would dismiss them entirely.  Kristen Stewart has absolutely had other worthwhile moments on film in movies like “Into The Wild,” “Adventureland,’ and the upcoming “The Runaways.”  It would be silly to judge her entirely on the work she does as Bella Swan.

The same is true of her co-star Robert Pattinson, who has a rabid fanbase, but who so far has yet to prove he can draw an audience outside of “Twilight,” and who I’ve never seen in a big enough role to judge one way or another.

The good news for his fans is that Pattinson is a real actor, an interesting guy capable of making some really intriguing choices on film, and if he can survive the “Twilight” series without developing a hatred of stardom, then he may well evolve into someone of real merit and weight.  He is charismatic and charming in much of “Remember Me,” and he works overtime to bring an emotional honesty to the role he plays.  He creates a solid onscreen rapport with his co-star Emilie de Ravin, and he really throws himself into his big scenes.

The bad news for his fans is that they have to content themselves with good work in a ridiculous film.  “Remember Me” is one of those movies (and there’s another one this month) that works well on its own terms, more than accomplishing its modest goals, until it makes a third-act home-stretch that goes totally off the rails.  Be warned… it’s hard to talk about the film with any sort of critical coherence without explicitly discussing what choices the film makes in its final minutes, so if you’d rather read this review after spoilers won’t bother you, then be warned.

In a way, you can’t pretend that the film does anything less than explicitly warn you what the ending will be in a thematic sense.  “Remember Me” is the story of a guy named Tyler and a girl named Ally who find each other in the shadow of personal tragedy, using the fact that they both have this shared pain as a common starting point in the attempt to use love as a healing force.  They spend a long lazy summer working through all the old pains and sorrows, and just as they accomplish a sort of peace and happiness, they are reminded once again how cruel the world can be.  The film ends in a general sense in the only way that it could end.  But the specific tragedy that writer Will Fetter uses is, frankly speaking, insane.  And the way it’s executed is one of those you-have-to-see-it-to-believe-it crazy moves that people will marvel at in the future.  It is tasteless to such a degree that it’s impressive.

It’s so hard to get right in a film, but showing how a couple falls in love, showing the details that push them together, the moments where they connect in a way that is significant… that’s something that can be incredibly potent on film.  I thougth “Blue Valentine,” a film I saw at Sundance, really worked in an effort to show how two people could connect deeply, while “Remember Me” falls back on some easy shorthand.  Even so, Emilie de Ravin and Robert Pattinson connect on film enough to sell the weak scripting.  Both of these actors seem to be completely dedicated to what they’re playing.  It’s the best work I’ve seen de Ravin do in anything, and I say that as a big fan of “Lost.”  He moves through the film like he considers this is “Rebel Without A Cause,” and since both he and de Ravin have to contend with their fathers (Pierce Brosnan and Chris Cooper, repectively) as major parts of their pain in the film, the “Rebel” comparison is particularly apt.

The entire cast does solid work, with Brosnan impressing me and surprising me as much as Pattinson.  Sometimes, I find Brosnan too mannered, but he’s really good here.  Allen Coulter, who directed the film, is a big TV guy.  I know his name from his time on “The Sopranos,” and he does everything he can to inject the film with a fresh energy, with some real gravitas, and to make it all come together.  He tries desperately to earn the ending, but he can’t.  No one could have.  The script just doesn’t give him room.

Overall, fans of Pattinson have already made their minds up, and that new “Twilight” preview in front of this will inspire some big box-office from them.  But I think many of them will be really taken aback with the film’s conclusion, and it’s not what they think they’re going to see.  That sort of bait-and-switch can be dangerous for a movie, and we’ll see what happens as audiences get a look at the film this weekend.  I just know I could feel the air go out of the room when I saw it.  People were jarred by the transition into the last moments, and several of them reacted audibly, something that will play out again and again as this fitfully-successful film delivers its bizarre payload.

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