Review: "Water for Elephants" is a beautifully-mounted, passionless drag

An old-fashioned, love-and-war under the big top spectacle, Francis Lawrence's period romance is easy on the eyes but so listlessly unromantic and glazed-over with its soporific nostalgia that it reveals (or rather diminishes) Sara Gruen's bestseller into a soggy, feeble circus melodrama more concerned with the sympathy of its animals than of its characters.
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Christoph Waltz, who plays the contemptible ringmaster August Rosenbluth, snaps and bites and lashes his bullhook out at all who oppose him and the film essentially - and rather tastelessly - runs on this conflict. He's a cheap, exhaustingly loathsome character that whatever charms the film may have (and they are few and far between) are tainted by a heinous middle-section.
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When animals aren't taking a beating for the audience, we're subjected to the touch-and-go romantics of Polish runaway Jacob Jankowski (Robert Pattinson) and the fetching, but married, Marlena (Reese Witherspoon).
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Pattinson plays Jacob like a bore - or rather, the author Sara Gruen's idea of a man - an impulsive, mannerly animal lover. He smiles nervously and ducks his head while Witherspoon tries her hand at platinum blonde buxomness. Honestly, Jacob and the over-the-hill elephant named Rosie make a better couple.
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Ultimately, Water for Elephants fails for the simple reason that it manages to take a setting that's so transportable and wondrous and yet produces something so hopelessly stolid and, worse yet, unpleasant. [D+]