An average movie

To be honest, I wasn’t really sure what to expect from this flick but since there was a decent cast involved, I thought I might as well check it out. Well, even though it definitely had some potential, I’m afraid it never really worked though. Indeed, the two main characters were interesting with some solid performances from Russell Crowe and Amanda Seyfried but the first thing that really bothered me was the back-and-forth in time. In my opinion, it is usually a useless gimmick and, most of the time, it is used because the makers don’t trust their material enough and try to make it look more sophisticated than it actually is. In this case, it was even more annoying than usual because, instead of focusing on what was happening during the actual scene involving this young woman, I was constantly wondering what happened with her father and the other way around. Concerning the part involving Russell Crowe’s character and his little girl, it was actually working fine, as long as they were focusing on their relationship but everything else was hardly interesting. Indeed, it was rather difficult to care about the lawsuit started by his in-laws as it was not only rather ridiculous but there was no room to actually develop these characters which were basically reduced to some rather underwhelming and unnecessary villains. Finally, it might seem like a small detail but it did seem that Jake Davis’s medical issues were more physical than an actual mental disease. Instead of some rather useless meetings with some fancy lawyers, maybe, they should have given some follow-up sessions involving Davis and his psychologist, especially since he spent more than 6 months in a mental institution. His daughter did get a session with a shrink but it happened just once and you might wonder why they didn’t bring this up again since her life was going through some major changes afterwards. Anyway, to conclude, even if the damned thing was rather half-baked, the two couples involved in the two story-lines were actually quite compelling and I think it is worth a look, at least, if you like the genre.