AllMovie

Although it features images of luminous beauty, moments of real emotional resonance, and action sequences of startling technical flair, this beyond-the-grave collaboration between Tom Tykwer and the late Krzysztof Kieslowski never quite comes together as either a story or a philosophical treatise. At first, Heaven seems to be a meditation on the politics of violence and the cruelty of fate. Eventually, though, it takes on the sickly tinge of a star-crossed fairy tale even as its best scenes shine with the visual power of pure cinema. Ever the stylish formalist, Tykwer expends more effort explicating the anxious, fateful transformation of an act of revenge into an atrocity than he does fleshing out the script's thin characters and muddled thinking. As for the plot, it seems to have been constructed more to enable the explosive opening scene and the hallucinatory coda than to describe the actual way events take shape in the everyday world. Even in her less than brilliant performances, Cate Blanchett remains supremely watchable; here she seems hampered by her character's cursory backstory and the improbable romance that bogs down the middle of the film. As for Giovanni Ribisi, it's hard to tell where the callowness comes from -- his character or his performance itself. Either way, he's convincing only in the scenes dealing with Filippo's troubled relationship with his father (played sensitively by Remo Girone). Given the unusual nature of the film's journey from page to screen, it's hard to know and pointless to guess who deserves the blame for its failings. Regardless, after the melancholy poetry of The Princess and the Warrior, its director Tykwer whose star seems most dimmed by Heaven.