I know this might sound fickle...

Everything but the acting is true. It's the film's biggest flaw IMO.

I liked many things about this film, but not everything. I suspect that what you identify as a weakness in acting, is in my estimation a fault of the screenplay. The dialog was especially weak, and paradoxically, I think this is because the screenwriter tried too hard to be faithful to the book, lifting exact quotes. However, out of a more complex context, some of these lines come across as stilted, insincere or worse. One example is when Carlitos is standing over where they buried the bodies of those who died the first night, and Carlitos recalls how he was telling the woman who was pinned under a seat to "Shut up," he exclaims "I'm so ashamed," which with no development of the whole scene and Carlitos's feelings about it, rings phony.

There are a number of other examples, that one just particularly struck me. Yet, according to Carlitos, that is exactly what he said - but he said more, and one thing films cannot do is expand much on the verbal, it's a visual communication medium. I think the screenplay would have been far better had it emphasized the story through the visuals and adapted the dialog to be true to the story but not necessarily directly from the book, so that carefully chosen words could have communicated the experiences the boys went through.

As for the actors, I think they mostly did well with what they had to work with.

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