Director Ang Lee's adaptation of author Yann Martel's Man Booker Prize-winning "Life of Pi" feels almost like two films sandwiched into one. In the core, you have the succulent special-effects-driven story of a young Indian survivor of a shipwreck who's adrift in a lifeboat with a man-eating Bengal tiger. Yet wrapped around that is a deeply fried New Age-y/spiritual parable about "finding God."
The first, surprisingly enough, boasts special effects done so well that you entirely buy the unlikely story on offer — that it's a living, breathing tiger, not a collection of pixels, prowling about that boat — while the second is handled so clumsily and is so po-faced that it completely fails to convince, a problem possibly inherent to Martel's source material.
Regular readers of this column will know by now that I like "magic realism" about as much as a lap dancer who calls asking for a date; no matter how good the proposition sounds, you know you're being had, and "Life of Pi" will certainly have you and then some.