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- "Pay It Foward"
(Reviewed October 18, 2000)
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You go into this movie expecting it to be manipulative and sappy and tear-jerkingly shameless. Over two hours later, you walk out dry-eyed and cheated, wondering how even the most clueless director and
screenwriter could screw up such a surefire weeper of a premise.
I never did read the original novel (somehow, books that make Oprah's reading list never find their way onto my shelves). So maybe everything that is wrong with this movie -- the painfully
uninteresting subplots involving one-dimensional characters, the utter unlikelihood of Kevin Spacey's well-educated school teacher being sexually attracted to Helen Hunt's white-trash boozehound slut,
Haley
Joel Osment's sitcomishly tired matchmaker hijinks -- came straight from the original. All I know is that this movie is phony and cold and fake to the core. If I ever had lowered myself to watch "Touched
By an
Angel," I would say that this movie feels like an attempt to push those same lowest-common-denominator "feel good" buttons, except with a trio of Oscar winners on hand to class up the crappy
material.
In fact, the producers are missing a bet if they don't immediately pitch "Pay It Forward" to a TV network as a series idea. Each week, some down-on-his-luck ne'er-do-well would get an
out-of-the-blue boon from a stranger, clean up his act (after a bit of dramatic struggling with his personal demons), and then pass on a kindness to somebody else. The rubes would eat it up with a
spoon!
Kevin Spacey, how could you waste your precious time on dreck like this? We all know that Helen "Mad About You" Hunt can't act (the
Academy members must have been hypnotized by her huge, wet-T-shirt-revealed jugs when she copped that undeserved Oscar for "As Good As It Gets"), so it is no great loss to the culture if she spends a
couple of months on this sort of histrionic hog wallow. And Haley Joel Osment is just a kid, so he has the excuse of not knowing any better. But you, Mr. S., should be above playing the kind of cardboard
construct lonely-guy character who makes a big secret about his past for the first two-thirds of the movie, saving it up for a Big Reveal (a la Tom Hanks in the execrable "Saving Private Ryan") that feels as
if it
were written by a script doctor who was brought in by your agent to let you chew the scenery. Sure, you probably cinched a Best Actor nomination when you dropped those two grocery bags during your
big
sputter-and-choke. But doesn't it all feel a little hollow? A little too easy? A little...cheap?
Absolutely the only thing that I didn't dislike about this terrible movie was its surprise climax. But even
that
minor pleasure was ruined when the director decided to outright steal the last shot from "Field of Dreams" for "Pay It Forward"'s last shot. Now that's really shameless.
Back Row Grade: F
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