Kristen Stewart & Robert Pattinson

Oh, how I swooned when Edward pulled out the ring and asked Bella to be his lawful undead-ed wife!

And how I marveled, in the drippiest of the three "Twilight" pictures so far, at how Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson have begun to murmur in precisely the same cadences, which is to say, with no cadence at all!

Warning: You surely cannot trust this review of "The Twilight Saga: Eclipse." I am unreliable, unrepresentative and unrepentant regarding the first two "Twilight"s -- both of which I liked, especially compared to the other abstinence-only vampire/werewolf/teen romance franchises out there.

Already, "Eclipse" has garnered praise as the best and most action-packed of the three -- which I don't understand. For me it's the most ponderous and most sloppily directed, and by far the most deadening when the dramatic necessity known as "talking" must be confronted, in between battles.

Director David Slade composes every shot for maximum readability on a BlackBerry. HUGE, woozy, handheld close-ups. Some moviegoers get dizzy watching a "Bourne" film; I get dizzy watching Slade's technique, which isn't technique at all: it's just any old shot at all, sometimes "verite" (i.e., shaky-cam), sometimes not.

"Eclipse" finds the human Bella (Stewart) inching closer to her decision to marry Sir Fwoopy Hair (Pattinson) and become a vampire, thus breaking the werewolf heart of Jacob (Taylor Lautner), the most famous resident of Camp Shirtless. The wolves and the vamps must broker their differences to take on the bloodthirsty vampiric "newborns" slowly making their way from Seattle down to the town of Fork, where Bella's police chief father (Billy Burke) is taking, like, forever to solve the unsolved murders.

More happens in "Eclipse" than in the previous "Twilight" zone, "New Moon," and yet it's duller. The people will come no matter what, make no mistake. Even if nobody made a third "Twilight" film a collective imagining of the thing, involving the most rabid five percent of the worldwide fan base, would still gross $500 million. (The first "Twilight," directed by Catherine Hardwicke, made $392 million; the second, directed by Chris Weitz, made $709 million.)

Slade may throw lots at the camera, but he paces everything like molasses running uphill. (His earlier films include "Hard Candy," well-acted garbage in a confined space, and "30 Days of Night," which proved that he can a make a movie with vampires in it, if not a good vampire movie.) Lots of folks barely got through "New Moon" alive, with all its molto elegiaco brooding. However self-serious, like the first "Twilight" it offered a sustained mood and some considered filmmaking.

Here, less so. The characters have grown more naive and stilted and sluggish. The music does not help. The first two outings were scored by Carter Burwell and Alexandre Desplat, respectively -- two of the most atmospherically persuasive composers in the business. The new score, by the ordinarily talented Howard Shore, is gunk.

Now and then a performer or two grabs your interest. Batting first for the Volturi, Dakota Fanning makes most of the other young pups on screen look pretty unimposing. The violence carries more blunt impact than it did in the earlier films. But you cannot tell me this is a livelier film than the first two. It merely has more characters, more competing interests, more necks snapped. The fourth and fifth "Twilight" features are to be directed by Bill Condon, who has done everything from "Gods and Monsters" to "Kinsey" to "Dreamgirls." That sounds more like it. "Eclipse" gets the job done, the job being the on-screen delivery of adapter Melissa Rosenberg's compressed version of the Stephenie Meyer novel. But that's all it does.

 

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"Twilight: Eclipse" Movie Trailer

 

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MPAA rating: PG-13 (for intense sequences of action and violence, and some sensuality).

Running time: 2:01.

Cast: Kristen Stewart (Bella); Robert Pattinson (Edward); Taylor Lautner (Jacob); Bryce Dallas Howard (Victoria); Billy Burke (Charlie); Dakota Fanning (Jane); Ashley Greene (Alice); Xavier Samuel (Riley).

Credits: Directed by David Slade; written by Melissa Rosenberg, based on the novel by Stephenie Meyer; produced by Wyck Godfrey and Karen Rosenfelt. A Summit Entertainment release.