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Nominate-best-2010

Review: The Boys Are Back

We're supposed to root for this guy?
By SHAULA CLARK  |  September 30, 2009
1.5 1.5 Stars

 

Director Scott Hicks (Shine) returns to warm hearts with the saga of Joe Warr, a journalist (based on real-life columnist Simon Carr, and played by Clive Owen) whose second wife (Laura Fraser) dies of cancer, leaving him a single father with a hands-off parenting style. With the help of some gorgeous scenery and fine acting, the film goes down easy, even though we're supposed to root for a guy who abandoned a six-year-old son and fucked off to Australia with his mistress after knocking her up with a child he's then too busy to care for.

Dramatic tension arises when Joe's assigned to cover the Australian Open in far-off Melbourne: he can't bring his brood, but his job's on the line. His solution? To monitor the matches from his living room, then leave his two kids (one from each wife) alone for a couple of days while he watches the final in person — a disastrous hack-meets-deadbeat maneuver.

Joe's "just say yes" policy is billed as an antidote to helicopter parenting, but there's little evidence that his laxity benefits anything but his own ego.

Related: Review: The International, Review: Duplicity, Review: Knowing, More more >
  Topics: Reviews , Celebrity News, Entertainment, Culture and Lifestyle,  More more >
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ARTICLES BY SHAULA CLARK
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  •   REVIEW: DEAR JOHN  |  February 05, 2010
    "We're sitting here . . . and we're talking, but nobody's actually saying anything."
  •   REVIEW: SUNDANCE SHORTS 2009  |  January 13, 2010
    Welcome to the world of "Sundance Shorts 2009," where the happy endings tend to look more like reprieves from misery.
  •   REVIEW: IN SEARCH OF BEETHOVEN  |  January 06, 2010
    Phil Grabsky's exhaustive documentary doesn't exactly dispel any stereotypes about Beethoven's being a shaggy genius prone to rages.
  •   52 WAYS TO LEAVE 2009  |  December 30, 2009
    Your usual lackadaisical approach to New Year's Eve — just see what happens and go with the flow — is not going to cut it this year. Sure, the end of this decade may not have the same kind of new-millennium pressure riding on it as the last one, but the plunge into 2010 is a milestone nonetheless.
  •   REVIEW: BROTHERS  |  December 09, 2009
    Operation Enduring Freedom seems to have replaced Vietnam as Hollywood's go-to military quagmire from which to dredge gut-wrenching meditations on the psychological carnage of war.

 See all articles by: SHAULA CLARK

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