With Jim Sabatini

Wish You Were Here

Rated: R for language, some drug content, brief sexuality and violence.
Reviewed by: Jim
Release date: June 14, 2013	Released by: Entertainment One

Kieran Darcy-Smith's new, perhaps, cautionary film has nonlinear disclosures with character vague motives and unintelligent actions not helping to render enough entertainment with a hurried, procedural minded conclusion.

Wish You Were Here stars Joel Edgerton, Felicity Price, Teresa Palmer and Anthony Starr as Aussie parents Dave (Edgerton of The Great Gatsby) and pregnant Alice (Price) on a weekend getaway to unfamiliar Cambodia in letting their hedonistic hair down.

A missing-person case ensues as their plight begins to unveil the kind of stuff that leads to divorce. With them on their trip was Alice's younger sister Steph (a pretty, if innocuous Palmer of the enjoyably self-reflexive Warm Bodies) and a new boyfriend (Starr).

The interesting execution of many tightly drawn frames allows for Edgerton and Price to establish more than enough presence but not the ideal type of empathy. Darcy-Smith has an intriguing way of doling out the measured narrative in fleet-of-foot flashbacks to help expound upon at least one example of waywardness. As etched with more than a modicum of volatility and vulnerability, Dave won't come over well at least toward the distaff married side even through a character-building distressing recollection.

To its credit, a too self-inflicted Wish You Were Here maintains a course of something important being on the line when good folks carelessly enter into rotten circumstances. One that slickly unwinds as a mystery with less wizened thrills than it should have to compellingly rise above some law enforcement questions.