The new movie “The Forgiven” once again answers the questions as to why it is so hard to write a screenplay. One reason is that the story has to make sense, hold the viewers attention and the actions of the main characters have to, for the most part, be consistent with what a person would really do within a crucial situation.

In this story a couple, Jo and David Henninger are vacationing in Morocco near the Sahara Desert. David is an alcoholic and their marriage is not going well. They get into a accident and hit a young boy at night. What follows are a series of mostly boring scenes that seem to do nothing more than fill in the two hours. The main part of the story involves local Arabic ritual with the boy’s father that no American or any foreigner would ever do. This is a big reason why this story fails in a big way because in order for a story to work, we all have to relate to and ultimately believe what the characters are doing.

This movie stars Ralph Fiennes as David and Jessica Chastain as Jo and I wondered why these two major actors agreed to make this below average movie considering the script is bad and they would have to be shooting on location for months, in the middle of nowhere – not to mention the extreme heat and bad conditions.

The ratings for this film are a low 60% range on both IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes and I agree with these ratings and do not recommend this movie.