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Title: Janie Jones
Review: A precocious young girl played by an up-and-coming starlet is left by her deadbeat mom to spend time with her absentee celebrity father, forcing a familial bond to develop that will lead the father, deeply in need of redemption, to a better place. If the plot of Janie Jones sounds familiar, it's because its skeleton pretty closely matches that of Sofia Coppola's film Somewhere. The difference? Somewhere is worth watching, while Janie Jones is not. So what kept the latter from reaching the heights of the former? I say Janie Jones, which stars Abigail Breslin as the daughter and Alessandro Nivola as the father, is entirely too familiar in its themes and, despite effective performances from its leads, never quite musters the dramatic heft it needs to outshine the others of its ilk.
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