A story of how a father is thrust into re-connecting with his daughters after a boating accident lands his wife in a coma.

It was much better than the trailers had led me to believe. I do try not to watch trailers because over the past 5 years or so it seems that the movie industry has got the idea into their skulls that we, the viewing public, need to have every moment of the film explained to us in a 3 minute trailer! The trailer had a heart-warming, slight comedic sense about it yet the film is nothing of the sort. Sure there are funny moments, which I was glad of, but the film in general is quite sombre; nothing out of the ordinary, nothing spectacular, just a good, solid story with identifiable characters and our leading man, George Clooney, on top form as always but certainly not “the performance of his career” as Empire Magazine would have you believe.

I smiled, I laughed, I cried; but then I went downstairs and made myself a cup of tea and moved on to the next film. The Descendants is a film that would have loved to stay in your mind as a tale of family coming together in the most terrible of circumstances, striking triumphant new bonds in the face of emotional adversity but it isn’t quite strong enough. It drifts out of your mind just as quickly as the final scene fades to black and the credits roll up.

3/5 not terrible, but not excellent either.