By Keith Walther | RLGR
If Hallmark ever became dark and depressing, this is what it would look like. Based on a true story, “The Unbreakable Boy” is set up to be an inspirational tearjerker but comes up short in its confusion of whose story it wants to tell. Cliches and preachiness further erode the conflicted storyline, marring the beauty of this young man’s journey.
When Scott (Zachary Levi) met Teresa (Meghann Fahy), it wasn’t quite love at first sight, it was more lust than anything. As luck would have it, she became pregnant with their first son and their lives would be forever changed. 13 years later, Austin (Jacob Laval) inherited his mother’s brittle-bone disease, making him a regular at the nearby hospital. On top of that, Austin also gets diagnosed with autism, making him a very unique boy who requires a lot of special attention.
Scott has his own internal struggles, feeling like a failure as a dad, he turns to alcohol and his imaginary friend Joe (Drew Powell) for answers. After his alcoholism costs him his job and subsequently their house, it doesn’t seem like things could get much worse for the reeling family, but then it does. Only a good amount of self-reflection and understanding Austin’s exceptional perspective can prevent everything from being lost.
Originally, “The Unbreakable Boy” was supposed to be released in 2022 but was delayed several years for undisclosed reasons. These reasons become a little more apparent after watching the film. Writer/director Jon Gunn has primarily focused his entire career on making faith-based movies, and he certainly uses this story to push a religious agenda that feels lazy and condescending. His laziness carries over to how he portrays autism in this movie, simplifying this complex condition into a cookie cutter box relying on sympathy to win over the audience.
Gunn is guilty of making this film as if he were the Debbie Downer character from Saturday Night Live, taking viewers from one misery induced event to the next. He brow-beats the audience with seemingly everything from the difficulties of parenting a child with physical and mental challenges to alcoholism to job loss to a crumbling marriage to depression. To this effect, he misaligns and confuses the story’s purpose, shifting the focus away from this inspiring boy to the alcoholic father with an imaginary friend. In fact, there’s a real missed opportunity to shine a light on the younger brother character, who grows up without these ailments, living in the neglected shadow of his needy sibling. However, that character is all but forgotten about as Gunn tries overly hard for pathos. He uses a series of cliches and emotionally driven dialogue to elicit a waterworks response from the audience, which only seems to work for fans of Lifetime movies.
Ever since his breakout as the title character in “Shazam!,” Zachary Levi has been toiling in the family film realm, capped by last year’s disappointing “Harold and the Purple Crayon.” While this latest film falls in that same category, Levi’s performance is still commendable. He successfully portrays a broken character who hasn’t met the bottom of a bottle he didn’t like and is prone to talking to himself. As he takes his character through the self-reflective phase of his journey, he’s able to garner audience support that helps buoy an otherwise sinking story.
Meghann Fahy, on the other hand, is a bad actress with a performance that seems more suited to a daytime soap opera than a major motion picture. Not surprisingly, she originally made a name for herself on a daytime soap called “One Life to Live.” Her acting in this film is forced and exaggerated with disingenuous emotions that fall completely flat for viewers. If it wasn’t for Levi’s screen presence, Fahy’s lackluster performance would certainly be more exposed. Hopefully, she finds a better acting coach for her upcoming starring role in a thriller called “Drop,” scheduled for release in April.
Parenting a child with autism is an important subject that many parents face on a daily basis, but there’s been movies that have done it better like 2023’s “Ezra.” “The Unbreakable Boy” is a try-too-hard type of movie that overcommits in too many different directions, only succeeding in making this remarkable true story seem somewhat false. That being said, if you happen to be a sucker for those melodramatic Lifetime movies, then you’ll likely succumb to a good cry with this movie.
This movie earns:
