'FALLEN'.......THE STORE BRAND YA MOVIE.......

Fallen (2016)   In our eternal role as Doting Dad, once again we succumbed to Beloved Daughter's entreaties to join her watching this film adaptation of yet another Young Adult novel series......in which, if you haven't guessed already, two supernatural teen studs vie for the favors of a conflicted, troubled heroine......

               Where have we heard this plot before?

               First mystery that perplexed us.....why does this movie even exist?  The studios that jumped on the YA bandwagon, salivating over the 'Hunger Games' and 'Twilight'  cash flow, jumped off just as fast when all the imitation YA's they produced went belly up......

                The filmmakers' choice of material here is especially pathetic......a blatantly generic, copycat version of a hundred other Young Adult novels, movies and TV shows.  Like a 59 cent coloring book you buy for kids at a supermarket, it's a series of barely sketched out images of all the expected YA tropes......the bad boy, the brooding boy, the girl torn between them, and the usual assortment of snarky, sinister and pop-culture wisecracking bystanders.....

                 If they'd only added a few gags and Anna Faris,  the movie could have easily functioned as a "Scary Movie" equivalent to Young Adult movies.......

               The plot? Oh, yes....we almost forgot But then so did the people who slapped together this movie.....

                Instead of vampires and werewolves, our motley crew of sullen hearthrobs and hotties  are fallen angels.....cast out of heaven and stuck on earth because they couldn't make up their minds whether to stick with God or join Big Red down in Hell......

                While watching this, it occurred to us to wonder........how come these thousands-of-years-old angels all look like teens and have to attend a school for social misfits and psychos?

                The school's a hoot......a sprawling European castle whose primary method of healing for its unruly, unhappy student body is an Olympic swimming pool......

                Somewhere near the end of the film.....(the point at which we checked our watch and muttered "Oh, thank God Almighty...")......cast members sprout glowing, cartoonish angel wings and engage in aerial dogfights high in the clouds.  Yes they do. Really.

                 By now, the target audience for this film is probably savvy enough to not hold their collective breaths waiting for any further adaptations of the subsequent books in the "Fallen" series.  (As we mentioned before, the audience should consider it a miracle that the various production companies involved managed to scrape up enough money to make even one of these.)

                 As the credits rolled, Beloved Daughter asked jokingly...."want to watch it again?"

                 Only in Hell.  Zero stars. (0).