MOVIE REVIEWS

Review by CinemaSerf

"Alison" (Florence Pugh) is happily engaged to "Nathan" (Chinaza Uche) until a tragic accident takes place whilst she is driving and, one year later, we discover that it's all change. She is struggling to come to terms with the incident and has developed a dependancy on prescription pain killers. Her mother (Molly Shannon) and her friends are at the end of their tethers and hope that maybe a meeting of AA might offer her some hope. It's at this meeting that she re-encounters her would-be father-in-law, and ex-cop, "Daniel" (Morgan Freeman) and we begin to fill in the gaps and start to comprehend just what has driven all of the parties to their current predicaments. Pugh never does anything half-heartedly, and she doesn't here either - but the story is weak and, for me, all just a little over-dramatic. The rather retrospective style of story telling leaves way too many gaps and the crises seem just a bit too contrived to be convincing. "Alison" is easily the most interesting of the characters, but she is also easily the most irritating, selfish and I found the lack of substance to the plot just made it harder to be sympathetic to her (or, for that matter, to "Daniel" or "Nathan"). It tries to deal with some serious and heart-rending topics, but Zach Braff seems content with offering a strongly performed but superficially presented, overly simplistic, melodrama here that I thought rather wasted the talent at his disposal. There are also far too many dreary guitar ballads that seems to step up where the writers suffer from a dearth of ideas. It's watchable, but not great.