Plot Details: This opinion reveals minor details about the movie's plot.

For the first time in my epinions career, I find that my work is really completely done for me, and I feel I must add my epinion anyway.

Quite frequently, I have avoided a review of something when I looked through other epinions, and found that some of them (or some group of them) pretty well summed up everything I had to say. Usually, these were not movies that I had very strong feelings about, and so, why bother?

In this case, however, I really felt I needed to at least add my voice. Now, as I said, I really feel that my work has been done for me here. Part of my work was done for me in the form of the reviews by Wokelstein, Sloucho, and Mangiotto. If you take their reviews together as one big mass, you pretty well get my feelings on the movie. They also all wrote excellent reviews.

The other portion of my work was done for me by the 'authors' of The New Lexicon Webster's Encyclopedic Dictionary of the English Language when they defined the word 'trite'.

Trite (trait) adj. - Stale through too frequent repetition, and boringly obvious.

You'll notice (hopefully), it's both, not just one or the other.


I mention this because I am something of a 'word Nazi' in the tradition of Seinfeld's 'soup Nazi'. It annoys me to no end when people use words that don't mean anything like what they are using them to mean. And, I don't like it when people throw extra, meaningless words into the conversation just because they feel they need to keep going.

The word literally (just to drive the point home) is one of the most abused words of recent memory. Somehow the word has adopted a new meaning something akin to 'hey, are you listening?' The general usage nowadays is of the form, 'I was literally X', or somesuch. Problem being, of course, that as used there is, in fact, no possible figurative or metaphorical use of X.

This started, I assume, when people said things like, "I am literally going to blow up," where they are obviously (yet oddly) trying to emphasize that they don't mean it literally, by saying 'literally'. Of course, no one would say that if they meant it literally, they would say, "Run! Save yourselves!"

But, the use somehow has been bastardized to the point that what you hear most frequently are things like, "She was, literally, putting my CDs in her car." As though there were some figurative, metaphorical, or even poetic way in which that might have meaning.


But, now I've gone off on a tangent. I actually bring this all up, because I almost wish that I could get away with writing a review that included nothing more than the word 'trite'.

Also, because Kevin Spacey is one of the worst ten-dollar word droppers you are likely to encounter in reality or fiction, and he gives us 'word Nazis' a bad name. As though we go about saying things like 'antidisestablishmentarianist' just because someone happens to be not only against the government (or established ruling body), but against those against the government as well. Pish posh.



I really have to guess that you know something of what happens in the movie, but let's take a quick look.

Haley Joel Osment is a small boy who gets an assignment from his teacher (Kevin Spacey) on the first day of school. The assignment is to do something to change the world. Whereas all the other children come up with fairly silly (childish) ideas, Haley comes up with the idea of 'Pay It Forward'. We are slyly (not really) nudged into believing that this is not simply a childish idea as well.

He will do a big favor for three people, and then they each do a favor for three people, and then ettzetarra, ettzetarra, ettzetarra.

Along the way, he tries (sort of as one of his three things) to set up his mother (Helen Hunt) with the aforementioned teacher.

Haley comes from an abused home, and his abusive father who comes back for a bit is none other than Jon Bon freakin Jovi. I imagine we are supposed to suspend disbelief and go along with the idea that Helen Hunt couldn't take him, among other things we have to suspend disbelief about.

So, as you can imagine, we work our way through several aspects of where this little idea has led, and hilarity ensues and so on. I won't give away too much mainly on the basis that it would hurt my brain to actually write the things that happen.


So Vormancian, you really love this movie, but why?

The movie is simply everything that is wrong with movies today. It is outrageously simplisitic, boring, and I would say contrived, but it seems hardly fair to other contrived things.

The worst part, of course, is that it seems that somewhere in here resides the potential for an above average movie. A small boy decides to take changing the world seriously, and sets a chain of events in motion that actually does something. There's something in there. We could have gone somewhere with that.

But, what do we get instead? People who pass on their good deeds by helping criminals elude the police, by forcing doctors to see another person ahead of you (because that obviously made some big difference). Most everything that happens in the movie is garbage.

The movie moves along at a moronic pace filled with little bits of idiocy at every turn. During most parts that people are trying to be serious you can hardly help laughing at them, and at any point that someone is trying to be funny you can hardly help but yawn.

The one good thing you might say about this film is that Kevin Spacey and Haley Joel Osment prove that they are very good at what they do. Not because they are good, but because they are not nearly so bad as anything else. To come through as almost tolerable in the midst of such annoying muck is quite a statement.

Sadly, Helen Hunt proves that she is much more a direct result of the material she is given.

To add insult to injury, we are forced to watch a uselessly long scene of Haley bouncing about like an idiot while watching wrestling. Why get a good child actor (let's face it, for a child he is really good)? Could we not get just about any child to do this? If you watch this scene very carefully you will see Haley rolling his eyes at having to do this.


This movie is an example (which we see so mind-numbingly often these days) of just how stupid Hollywood thinks we all are (and who can blame them really, seeing as how such movies make so much money), and how often the filmmakers of today just can't follow through.

There is something here as I've said. You've got a halfway decent premise, a whole lot of money in the bank, some very popular and talented actors lined up, and then... nothing.

All you end up with is something of a combination of an after-school special and an anti-smoking commercial, that is filled to the very brim with sappy nonsense, and all sorts of politically correct drivel.

The movie fails on so many levels it is hard (and pointless) to try and mention them all, but it's greatest failing is that the idea behind the movie is trying to show good by contrasting it with evil, yet the movie's candy-coated, 'feelgoodiness' won't allow it to actually show any evil.

Imagine the version of 'Life is Beautiful' where you don't see anything bad happen, you only get subtle hints that perhaps there is some bad somewhere, but maybe it's just a rumor.

You could call the movie formulaic, but again, that seems almost an insult to other things that are formulaic. This goes beyond formulaic into a whole new realm where movie elements (especially all the characters) are not only 'borrowed' from some textbook 'Classic Plots, Characters, and Dialogue for the Beginning Student,' but they are actually 'cut-and-pasted' straight into the movie.

Save yourself from this movie, it gets my lowest possible recommendation.



Recommended: No

Viewing Format: VHS