Stupid moral: If you can't win, KILL YOURSELF

Rating: Null/10 (23 March 2005)

Let's just talk about the movie as a story and the characters as characters and forget what it's trying to teach us for a minute.
As a story, it sucks. The characters are unmotivated. The characters and events are not believable. Non-essential characters litter the screen.
Off the top of my head: - The movie's Jar Jar Binks character - the retarded kid who can't figure out how they get the ice in the bottle - if he were not in the movie it would be shorter and not lose any "impact" (such as it is). He's unessential to the story. Lose him.

The German boxer who is widely known to cheat but hasn't been kicked out of professional boxing. This isn't WWF, it's supposed to be real boxing and yet this character is not in jail. Unbelievable.

The priest who, upon hearing Hilary wants to commit suicide, tells Clint he'll go to hell and walks away. No offer to visit her, provide counseling for her or Clint, etc. Unbelievable character.

Hilary has a very Catholic name ("Mary Margaret") while her siblings all have hillbilly names. Her name is obviously Catholic so the movie can take a poke at the mores of the Catholic church without considering that there are few Catholic hillbillies in southern Missouri.

The constant, unending, never yielding voice over. If someone the caliber of Clint Eastwood can't tell a story through the actors' words and actions, and if actors the caliber of Hilary Swank and Morgan Freeman can't tell us what they're thinking through their reactions and facial expressions, then none of these people are worth the price of my ticket, let alone an Oscar. And it necessitates that Morgan Freeman follow Clint to the hospital -- only required since he's narrating that part.

The alluded to, long-standing conflict between Clint and his daughter, which apparently exists only as a vehicle for the narration. Drop the conflict, the movie stays the same. If you can drop a character without changing the story, the character is unnecessary.

Hilary's character spends a few days in bed and decides to kill herself. Think about it: This is a woman who has sacrificed everything to achieve a goal. She's single-minded and determined. But she encounters just one set-back and boom! she gives up. Professional athletes just aren't like that. Consider even Christopher Reeve - he was just an actor and yet he fought for years to overcome the same injury and made a substantial recovery. Another unbelievable character.

The intensive care unit where you can shut off (not just disconnect from the patient, but reach over and SHUT OFF) a breathing machine and no alarms go off nor do nurses come running. Unbelievable.

The unbelievable ending where Clint kills someone and walks away and eats pie. No investigation, no consequences.

This is the movie that refuses to die. It's too long. Within minutes of the incident in which Hilary Swank is injured, we get the picture. Bring it to an end. But there's like another hour of nothing after that. Kill somebody. Blow something up. Burn something down. End it.
One reviewer said most of the audience sat through the credits in order to get ahold of their emotions. When I saw it everyone just got up and left. My wife cries at just about everything in movies and she found nothing emotional in this one. As for my part, I was crying tears of joy that it was over. Finally.
Here's the kicker: The movie tries to change your mind about the idea of "mercy killing", but the fact that the goal-oriented, determined, all-sacrificing professional athlete star of the movie COMPLETELY GIVES UP sends this message: If you're pursuing a goal and you meet a setback, KILL YOURSELF.
If you liked this movie, you don't understand anything about how movies should be put together. You're focusing on the questionable moral implications and thinking that makes it "deep". Frankly, Sideways was deeper, and it was shallow. This is a horrible movie that serves only to reveal the deep liberal political and moral biases of the motion picture industry. They abandoned their status as professional story-tellers to award a movie based on their politics and religious views. Nobody who knows anything about storytelling could possibly give this movie an Oscar unless their political and religious feelings overwhelmed their common sense.