Pay It Forward

The quote to the side is pretty much the moral of this movie it seems. No matter how much good you do, bad shit can still happen to you for no apparent reason. I guess I should preface this review with this: I am making an exception to my rule of no spoilers. That’s because the worst atrocity of this movie is it’s “twist” ending. If you don’t want to know the ending I will tell you a capsule review right now. Stop watching right after the news interview. That’s where director Mimi Leder should have ended it. This movie has a great and moving message, but it’s completely destroyed by the last 15 minutes.

For the rest of you, this is a warning away from the movie with the worst ending in the history of movies. I pretty much undermines the rest of this “feel-good” movie.

Here’s the story in a nutshell.

Trevor (Haley Joel Osment) is a young boy who thinks that the whole world is against him. And it really seems to be. He lives in Las Vegas with his absent, drunk mother, Arlene (Helen Hunt), who does all she can to provide for him, including working two jobs (one at a sleazy near-strip club and one at a casino), but she doesn’t really seem to know that he’s really there. His school is armed. He doesn’t have any real friends. His father (Jon Bon Jovi) is gone, hopefully to never come back (but of course he does at the most inopportune time).

Enter Mr. Eugene Simonet (Kevin Spacey), a social studies teacher who was the victim of some pretty horrific burns and now is seen as sort of a freak around the school. The thing is that he’s a really good teacher and he eventually earns the respect of his students.

He also gets them to think and challenges them to change the world. He assigns them an extra credit project in which they must find a way to change the world in their own way. Of course all of the kids come up with their own lame ways. (One kid says that he’ll e-mail all of the kids in China and have them jump up at the same time trying to knock the world off of its axis.)

But Trevor plays his trump card. He says that he will help three people in big ways that they can’t do for themselves. Then, instead of those people paying him back, they have to pay it forward (I got pretty sick of hearing that phrase by the end of the movie) to three other people, thereby causing a chain of do-gooders.

Pretty damn good idea, if a bit Utopian.

So Trevor helps out a bum (James Caviezel) by giving him a meal and letting him sleep in their garage one night and shower in the morning. This, of course, freaks mom out and she tells James to leave. He tries to pay it forward by fixing her truck. Trevor then tries to get his mom and his favorite teacher hooked up. (In one of the movie’s more affecting scenes a very nervous Mr. Simonet tries to ask Arlene out on a real date. Pretty nerve-wracking stuff.)

His third and last good deed is trying to help out a friend who is being beat up by the school bullies. Unfortunately he freezes and just stands and watches while the kid is thrown into a dumpster.

All of these misadventures are interrupted occasionally by the road trip of reporter Chris Chandler (Jay Mohr) who is trying to figure out who started the pay it forward movement.

When he finally does find out who it was he interviews Trevor who thinks that his good deeds failed, but his mom carried it on because she helped out her mother. There are some meaningful looks between Arlene and Eugene who have been through some tough times lately.

And that’s where this movie should have ended. At an hour and 45 minutes it’s still a respectable length. But they had to make it a little over two hours and ruin any good feelings I had toward the whole Pay It Forward movement.

They had to kill of Trevor.

Yes, boys and girls, they had Trevor try to save his buddy again (all while Arlene and Eugene are making up…against the lockers of the school) and he gets stabbed in the process. Not only does he get stabbed, but it’s a minor stab wound in the side. Somehow though, his mother and Eugene are told at the hospital (by a very unsympathetic doctor from the looks of it) that they couldn’t save him. (They must be in the medical dark ages in Vegas if they couldn’t save him from the pinprick that he got from the other kid.)

Then, as if it’s supposed to make us feel better, we get to see everyone who was touched by Trevor’s idea. And it’s a line of cars with candle holding occupants that stretches all along he desert highways of Vegas.

It, however, didn’t make me feel good. It made me sick. The writers of this film decided that we couldn’t get the point of a life touching other lives unless that life was taken. Instead of having a child who grew up to become a leader of some sort we have a martyr. They used the DEATH OF A CHILD to pull tears out of a bunch of poor saps who this sort of thing works on.

I don’t know if it worked better in the book, but it certainly served only to piss me off in the movie. (And not many movies piss me off.) It negated anything that the filmmakers were trying to do.

Mimi Leder should be ashamed of herself for this one. All because of a 15 minute epilogue that shouldn’t have been. The movie was moving, affecting and even kind of funny up until that point.

And to think that I liked Deep Impact.

Other than that the acting was great. Spacey and Hunt were great as always and Haley showed that he was no one trick pony.

But if you insist on seeing this movie (and I do suggest that you watch most of it) stop it right after the interview. Watch further and you’ll be as pissed off as I was. I guarantee it.