City Desk: Internal Emigrés

I cannot begin to list the shabby and sloppy sentimentalities of this movie, which equal, indeed surpass, its flagrant improbabilities. Contrivance, implausibility, and tearjerking have their unholy heyday here, perhaps expectably from the Mexican-born American director Luis Mandoki, who has several heart-wringers to his credit, and who previously teamed up with the similarly endowed screenwriter Gerald DiPego on the preposterous Message in a Bottle. DiPego, a specialist in dime-store mysticism, also gave us, among others, the insufferable Phenomenon with John Travolta. Marco Beltrami’s score helps this brimming tureen of soupiness overflow.

You may remember Jim Caviezel (Catch) as the sacrificial hero-soldier in The Thin Red Line and the saintly would-be suicide of the inspirational stinker Pay It Forward. Here, again, he is a beatifically hollow-cheeked scarecrow with suction-cup eyes and a swoony voice. The rest—including Sonia Braga, Victor Argo, Shirley Knight, and Terrence Howard—swim as well as one can in a sea of goo, and, except for her distracting accent, Miss Lopez, I repeat, cops the palm. NR

About the Author

Richard Brookhiser

Historian Richard Brookhiser is a senior editor of National Review and a senior fellow at the National Review Institute.

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I cannot begin to list the shabby and sloppy sentimentalities of this movie, which equal, indeed surpass, its flagrant improbabilities. Contrivance, implausibility, and tearjerking have their unholy heyday here, perhaps expectably from the Mexican-born American director Luis Mandoki, who has several heart-wringers to his credit, and who previously teamed up with the similarly endowed screenwriter Gerald DiPego on the preposterous Message in a Bottle. DiPego, a specialist in dime-store mysticism, also gave us, among others, the insufferable Phenomenon with John Travolta. Marco Beltrami’s score helps this brimming tureen of soupiness overflow.

You may remember Jim Caviezel (Catch) as the sacrificial hero-soldier in The Thin Red Line and the saintly would-be suicide of the inspirational stinker Pay It Forward. Here, again, he is a beatifically hollow-cheeked scarecrow with suction-cup eyes and a swoony voice. The rest—including Sonia Braga, Victor Argo, Shirley Knight, and Terrence Howard—swim as well as one can in a sea of goo, and, except for her distracting accent, Miss Lopez, I repeat, cops the palm. NR