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Mar 24, 2015 By Zach Hollwedel Web Exclusive

Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence are back on screen together again for a third go-around. They’re not hustling in America or finding the silver linings this time; rather, they’re chopping down trees in the Smokey Mountains in 1929. And together, they utterly and completely disprove the old adage that “the third time’s the charm.”

Based on the book by Ron Rash (which must have been better than the adapted screenplay for a studio to pick up the rights to it), Serena is a clunker and a bore as a film. The story begins when logging baron Pemberton (Cooper, who never once looks like he belongs in the 1920s) lays eyes on Serena (Lawrence) for the first time. He chases after her on horseback and tells her, “I think we should be married.” So, they get hitched. All is well for the newlyweds—despite the unavoidable presence of Pemberton’s neighboring child out of wedlock—until Serena begins butting heads with her husband’s right hand man at work, and the pesky U.S. government tries to turn Pemberton’s Smokey Mountains into a National Park. With the odds stacked against them and their love—which never sells itself, anyway—the Pembertons are forced to get their hands dirty if they’re to save their family and fortunes.

It’s hard to imagine how Lawrence and Cooper, coming off of so many great films together and individually, could deliver such a stinker. Then again, no Hollywood actor is without a dud or two along the way. The blame rests on director Susanne Bier’s shoulders. Bier is no newcomer. She directed the 2011 Oscar-winning Foreign Language Film, In A Better World, as well as 2007 nominee After the Wedding (plus many others). Bier clearly knows how to craft a film, same as Lawrence and Cooper know how to move an audience, but none of that comes across. Serena begins to bore practically before it starts, and then the film jumps so chaotically and frantically from scene to scene, it leaves viewers feeling thoroughly uprooted (much like one of Pemberton’s trees) for the duration of the movie. Bier never takes the time to fully explain the urgency of the Pembertons’ love, and she needs to. These are two gorgeous people, seemingly with money, who complain that they can’t find love? Maybe it’s because neither ever seems passionate. Despite their collaborations together, Cooper and Lawrence manage to have next to no chemistry. Whatever went wrong with Serena, it went wrong in a big and disappointing way.

www.magpictures.com/serena

Author rating: 3/10