August Rush is essentially a formulaic romantic comedy/melodrama with a prodigious orphan thrown in. As if someone was watching Serendipity (or something worse) and said, “This is good—but it just needs more Oliver Twist.” Well, whoever it was that said that was wrong on both counts, but apparently no one told them, and August Rush got made as a result. The film is, like its titular character, the bastard child of some unfortunate judgment calls made in the dark. It’s arguably less useful, though.

Like many recent films, Rush is convinced that it’s really cool to mangle time unnecessarily. So the film begins in the present day, and we meet Evan Taylor (Freddie Highmore), an 11-year old living in a New York orphanage. He’s quiet, gets picked on, is convinced there’s music in everything, believes his parents are still alive, etc., etc. Think every orphan stereotype you’ve ever heard. Then we flash back 11 years (complete with a huge subtitle reading “11 YEARS EARLIER,” for the stupider people in the audience, I guess), and meet his (future) parents. They’re introduced in a lengthy segment where mother Lyla (Keri Russell) and father Louis (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers) both play concerts at the same time. She’s a classical cellist, he’s a rock guitarist. It’s kind of like Metallica’s S&M record, except without, you know, good music. (Actually, it came off as eerily similar to the Pepsi Blue commercial featuring Papa Roach and some Benedictine monks. Anyone remember that one?) This, of course, is the sequence where director Kirsten Sheridan reminds us that Hey! Rock music and classical music are BOTH MUSIC! Even if we assume the purest of intent here, it’s downright insulting to both rock fans and classical fans. But I digress.

Anyway, Louis and Lyla both finish off the evening by going to the same party. Here they meet, talk for five minutes or so, fall in love, and then have unprotected sex—as we all know you’re obligated to do with someone you’ve just fallen in love with. But in a Hollywood near-impossibility, the sex actually results in a pregnancy. Then Lyla and Louis of course are torn apart—their worlds are just too different! or something!!!—but Lyla carries the baby to term, right up to the point where she gets hit by a car. This induces birth, but also unconsciousness, and her father, thinking he’s protecting her from the seed of that awful rock musician, puts the child up for adoption and tells her he was stillborn. Are you following this? You may want to take notes.

Flash forward 11 years again. (Seriously, would it kill them to just tell the story in order?) Lyla and Louis’ lovechild Evan has escaped from his orphanage and is running rampant in downtown Manhattan. Louis and Lyla have both given up music forever! Because it reminds them of each other! But Evan is a musical genius! Apparently, because his parents were musicians! I guess! (First they strain the human interaction beyond believability, then they strain genetics to the breaking point.) He falls in with a bunch of preadolescent street musicians who are wrangled by a man known as Wizard (Robin Williams, in yet another lousy career move). He changes his name to August Rush, and makes a name for himself on the streets playing guitar. Meanwhile, of course, Lyla, who is working as a substitute teacher in Chicago, finds out Evan/August/whoever is still alive (via the ol’ deathbed confession plot point), and travels to New York, hell-bent on finding him. And guess what? Louis, who’s now a businessman in San Francisco, travels to Chicago, hell-bent on finding her. Anyway, a bunch more stuff happens, and then the credits roll.

Do you really want to see this movie? I’ve definitely seen worse films, but this one was still pretty hard to sit through. None of the characters are given more than one note to play (pun intended) in the whole thing. We have the little black girl who sings gospel, the hard-drinking but sensitive Irish rockstar, the shy girl who plays cello, and of course, the child prodigy. It’s not as though Highmore implied he could act in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, but here he proves once and for all that he really can’t. (He reminds me of Haley Joel Osment in A.I., but Osment was trying to play a robot.) There’s some decent music in the film, but there’s also some really awful music (the filmmakers see fit to mix and match genres as they so desire, thus watering them all down and divorcing them from the cultural roots that make them interesting in the first place). To boot, the film touches on nearly every visual cliché there is. (Case in point: that thing where they zoom in on the actor, but not the background, when the character is seeing something important. That thing was overdone before it was invented.) If you can take your brain sufficiently out of your head, you might be able to enjoy this film, but I wasn’t able to manage. Any film that goes out of its way to bow so low before the altar of Music (even for a music lover like myself, this was obnoxious) and simultaneously talks down to its audience (in every way possible) is a turkey in my book.