THE LOVELY BONES: love, death and too much cgi

Cinema's Serial Killer Hall of Fame has a new inductee. 
His name is George Harvey. 
As played to perfection by a justly Oscar nominated Stanley Tucci, George is the most genuinely creepy and disturbing movie bad guy I've seen in a long time.
It gives nothing away to reveal that early on he murders 14 year old Suzie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan). THE LOVELY BONES is not a whodunit, a why-he-dunit or even a will-he-get-away-with-it. There is, to be sure, an element of the latter but the real focus is on the impact on the murder victim and her family.
Rather disconcertingly the story is told by Suzie, looking back on the events from her vantage point in a spectacularly lush and beautiful way-station on the road to heaven. She watches George going on with his everyday life as her heartbroken family struggle to pick up the pieces of theirs.
Dad Jack's (Mark Wahlberg) obsession with finding Suzie's killer places intolerable strains on his marriage to Abigail (Rachel Weisz), preventing them from giving Suzie's younger sister and brother the support that they need. The healing proves to be long, painful and incomplete.
It's a story with huge potential for cloying sentimentality and gratuitous tugging of the heartstrings and while it does stray into that territory on occasion it manages to avoid feeling cloying or sappy. Much of the credit for that belongs to the mature and assured performance by 15 year old Ronan as the murder victim who discovers there's life after death.  
THE LOVELY BONES is a considerable change of scale for director Peter Jackson after "King Kong" and "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy but he hasn't abandoned his attachment to computer generated imagery. There's loads of it on show, most obviously in the creation of the aforementioned way station which ressembles a collection of photo-shopped screensavers for the most idyllic places minus the couple walking hand in hand on the sand.  
This surfeit of cgi is a big minus which offsets some of the pluses offered by Tucci and Ronan. The end result is that - despite being disturbing, moving and emotionally engaging - THE LOVELY BONES is too uneven to be a truly great movie.