My family and I recently watched this movie. Last night, in fact. My first observation is that you can’t get time back, once spent. Even when you ask God politely.
No, I didn’t like this movie. I could have, with both eyes squinted. But I’m not interested.
About the movie, with full spoilers so I may unabashedly save my small readership the horrors of this waste of time: Directed by Mark Forster who also did Machine Gun Preacher and World War Z, both of which I’ve seen, as well as Monster’s Ball and Finding Neverland, which I haven’t and likely won’t. I don’t have a problem with Mark, anyway.
How about the writers? There are three: Fredrik Backman, a Swiss writer who also worked on A Man Called Ove and in fact wrote the novel both movies are based on. Hannes Holm, another Swede, also worked on both movies and directed A Man Called Ove. David McGee, of Flint, Michigan, was the screenwriter for A Man Called Otto and also Life of Pi, Mary Poppins Returns and Finding Neverland. Ge also has an executive producer credit for A Man named Otto.
Usually I don’t care so much about these things. But someone either caved to the woke idiots or is the woke idiot actively injecting garbage into what could have been a bleakly sweet movie. I think I’m going to have to watch Ove if I want answers. If the same elements are all in Ove, it’s the writer primarily. If not, then the screenwriter, producer, and ultimately the studio are the idiots.
Grumpy Gump
The story follows a guy named Otto who they establish in the first few minutes is an angry, OCD-level control freak, or perhaps a little Asperger-ish. Definitely he has an axe to grind with the world for not following the rules. Well, not Rules like “thou shalt not kill”, rules more like “that mailbox color isn’t approved by the HOA”. He’s an aged-out Boomer engineer at a rebar manufacturing plant who got shuffled out in favor of the lower-paid millennial he trained. Every other man in the film is emotional, incapable, and millennial. In fact, this movie could be titled GenX: the People This Movie Forgot. Remember us, the feral kids the Boomers raised? The ones who are just as capable if not more so because mommy and daddy were too busy trying to find themselves to actually raise us in person?
Sorry. So Otto’s decided to pull the red handles and go be with his dead wife. But mishaps and inept millenials keep disturbing him with their neediness for his Boomer skills like having a ladder or knowing how to back a trailer, or actually having tools and knowing their names and how to use them. Is he ever going to get to take a forever nap? He can’t help himself. “Someone on the internet is wrong” could be the meme of this movie. The curmudgeon does have a heart, and you find out first when he helps his new neighbors (Mexican wife), his old neighbors (black), his dead wife’s homeless student (transgender), and all the millennial males are closet Bi, by the way their parts are written. Oh yeah, his dead wife becomes paralyzed (disabled: check!) and in the process loses her baby, a very touching scene where the director kills off the only GenX in the movie in utero. This kind of blatant box-checking annihilates what could have been a darkly comedic and achingly sweet movie, in a “Throw Momma From the Train” kind of way.
The ultimate showdown in this movie is between the developers who are slowly buying up his neighborhood, having already bought the hill behind and removed all the trees Otto’s subdivision is named for, and the black couple he and his wife had known for years. The husband is wheelchair-bound and non-communicative, and his wife has a degenerative disease that is not yet showing. Somehow the developers have illegally accessed the medical records of these people and used this information to trigger a power-of-attorney their estranged son has over them. Otto intervenes and in the process mends fences and makes amends for his past bad behavior and saves the day for everyone, then goes home and dies of an enlarged heart. Yes, you heard me right.
Grumpy Gump Cuddles a Stunt-Kitty, But No Oscars
The problem is not that it’s a total dumpster fire with no redeeming qualities. The first is the woke garbage. The second is the world with an entire generation of human beings missing. The third is the total absence of religion. They didn’t even bother to misrepresent any kind of Christianity. Like Castaway, we were just line-item vetoed despite the myriad of heavy life issues that abound in this movie. I take that back, Otto did leave a letter, and in it requested a funeral of some kind. Well, it was in a traditional-looking church, most likely because the woman listed as next-of-kin was his Mexican neighbor. But compared to all the life-changing and life-ending drama portrayed, that was near-gag reel status.
This movie had so much squandered potential. There are heart-rending scenes and good plot lines. Tom Hanks reliably delivers as an old Boomer curmudgeon. The black humor of the botched and interrupted self-forever-sleep scenes worked. There were opportunities taken to show a character arc that reliably sold the core of the story.
I’m glad, at least, that we spent no money to watch this.
Rotten Tomatoes is running at 97% fan approval, proving that democracy and popularity are a great guide for excellence, just like in high school, and the critics are running at around 67%. This is more “broken clock theory”, proving that even imbecile AI programs writing movie critiques can be right some of the time.
And just to prove I’m not, go check out stand-up comedian legend Steven Wright’s interviews with Conan O’Brien on YouTube and get his book, Harold.
Kirk, out.
