This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2013, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

Shia LaBeouf gets the crap beaten out of hom in "The Necessary Death of Charlie Countryman."

Well, the character he plays - the title character - gets beaten to a bloody pulp.

You'd think it was all movie magic. It had to be, right?

Except that when LaBeouf was asked about those scenes, he wasn't exactly expansive. He wasn't eloquent.

Heck, he was barely coherent.

He babbled about preparing for those scenes. "Fear does wild things to you, you know," was about the best he could come up with.

Either he was a really good actor in the movie … or he wasn't. Hard to tell.

Scott D. Pierce