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Water for Elephants is boring. I think just about everything involving the circus or the Great Depression is boring (some of the works of John Steinbeck excluded), but Water for Elephants is boring even by the “Hey, we’re so colorful and soulful” standards of circus and/or Depression stories. The main problem here is neither the character of lead Robert Pattinson nor love interest Reese Witherspoon are in any way interesting. They’re stock characters with the personality of the upcoming sentence. This is a sentence. Seriously, I don’t know who these two characters are. Pattinson knows stuff good about animals. Witherspoon rides stuff good about animals. They would like to see each other naked. They would like to bone each other. Both are oppressed by temper-tantrum-throwing ringmaster Christoph Waltz, but there’s no why to their love. They just do.

I gave this one a C, which is in some ways the worst grade you can bestow. That means it was neither interestingly good nor interestingly bad. It just was. Bad, that is. Now I wonder if this is a crummy adaptation of a touching, wonderful bestseller or a faithful adaptation of an overrated sack of literary white rice.

No, I take that back. I like white rice. I would eat it by itself. A comparable book version of Water for Elephants would be unsalted bow-tie pasta.

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