Reviews

Bad Parents takes a fine, if obvious premise that traveling youth soccer is a vicious jungle and tries hard to make a full movie out of the carnage. But too much emphasis on the repressed sexual needs of the moms, and a terribly misguided reaction to a state finals loss pushes this film over the edge from funny to pathetic.

As a rule it's only funny if it's funny. If you want to make is serious, that's in play, but then you should consider being realistic.

I was a soccer parent for several years. The truth in this film is strong in spots, but it got bent like Beckham in my opinion.

It's incredible to me that people pass off this by-the-numbers TV movie slog as believable or well acted. Perhaps the plot just not aging well. The characters - four black youths accused of murder, the social justice minister who gets involved, the news media covering and exploiting the whole mess ....it's all very formulatic. The crime is beyond defense, the guilt is not in question, so the audience is really asked to spend too much time worrying about everything else.

This film explains itself to you every step of the way, but leads nowhere. Bruce Davidson valiently tries to keep the message on point, but in showing us the "circus" this trial became, the director makes it a muddle.

Pass on it.

I enjoyed the period nature of this movie, and there's nothing about it that bothered me..

EXCEPT that I found this movie labeled under sports and not "faith" . It truely could have been made without using the baseball scenes at all. "Townboy" goes to the rural mill, where town boys seldom tread due to some poorly explained "code." Ok, let's put him there because he needs a good job! He sparks with a mill workers girl and creates hard feeling. This could be contained inside the mill.

Baseball seems to be in this film only as a methaphor for sin, which is kind of a stretch. But it's needed in order to enfuse the Baptist moralizing which is for sure the point of this film. And that's a fine base for a movie.

Any plot device would have been as good. Not a bad film, but made for an ultra conservative audience to watch in between "Little House" episodes. Nostalgia for a simpler time is the message. The baseball is just a pasttime.

I was really hoping here, but this one really feels derivative. Every character is a copy of other sports movie townies and relatives surrounding the main character, in this case a promising football player wrecked by injury. It seems like the whole point of the movie is how depressing it is to be poor, especially in a small town. It's not poorly made, but you've seen it before.