I'm puzzled as to why Mark Wahlberg (and a lot of other very talented people, including screenwriters Mary McMurtry and Diana Ossona) thought the story of Joe and Jadin Bell deserved its own movie.
If you know what happened to the real-life father and son, you'll know what I mean. (No spoilers.) The ending has zero sense of feel-good moral uplift--no matter how contrived it might have played--because the "true story" makes that impossible. It just feels...kind of pathetic and deeply sad.
There's one good scene in the entire movie, and it's a heart-to-heart talk between Wahlberg and Gary Sinise as a sympathetic cop who picks him up on the side of the road and gives him a hot meal.
The rest, sad to say, is a well-intentioned big-screen After School Special that fails on nearly every conceivable level.
If you know what happened to the real-life father and son, you'll know what I mean. (No spoilers.) The ending has zero sense of feel-good moral uplift--no matter how contrived it might have played--because the "true story" makes that impossible. It just feels...kind of pathetic and deeply sad.
There's one good scene in the entire movie, and it's a heart-to-heart talk between Wahlberg and Gary Sinise as a sympathetic cop who picks him up on the side of the road and gives him a hot meal.
The rest, sad to say, is a well-intentioned big-screen After School Special that fails on nearly every conceivable level.