Like a high-jumper cracking the bar in two with his forehead, former teen star Zac Efron fails to make it into the Mature Performer league in this unendurable romantic drama, filmed in the buttery late-summer glow I associate with movies such as Message in a Bottle and The Notebook. Efron plays Charlie St Cloud, a talented high-school yachtsman with a modest family background – his mom, played by Kim Basinger, is a nurse. The yacht-snob kids sneer at Charlie, but he still kicks their asses in races and has just landed a sailing scholarship to a tip-top Ivy League school. (It would be nice, incidentally, to think his name was inspired by the name of Edward Heath's craft: Morning Cloud.) But grim fate upends all Charlie's life plans and the movie is landed with a hugely embarrassing I-see-dead-people premise that owes more to Ricky Gervais's Ghost Town than M Night Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense, and there seems to be a fair amount of cheating and fudging in the way that this premise is applied. Efron has a best mate, Alistair, played by Augustus Prew, as an exotically Cockney Brit – which, for a non-jock, sensitive-straight male lead, is probably the equivalent of a heroine's gay confidant. Future historians of the financial crisis may point to this movie, not Oliver Stone's Wall Street sequel, as the cultural low point of the business world. The very fact that one former yacht-snob is identified as an employee of Goldman Sachs marks him out as irredeemably evil.