One Sentence: The conflict is at the beginning of the movie.
Rated: PG-13
Nudity: None
After Credits: None
I am not sure what The Good Lie is supposed to be. It feels like it is another movie like The Blind Side or The Million Dollar Arm but without the sports. White people save black people and make them better. However The Good Lie does this after the first act. So then we are left with this movie where the situation of these refugees just keeps getting better and better. There is a secondary conflict but it is very tame compared to the first one and doesn’t really feel like anything compared to the horrible things shown in the first act. The movie felt backwards. It felt like everything bad is behind us, and it has all been solved. So there is no build up, no ending really and just the movie fades away as it slowly had been for the last hour.
I guess outside of the odd structure of the movie it is fine. It actually opens with some powerful moments, and paints a picture of the fighting in Africa that we do not really see. From the eyes of Children and it is done very well. It is some striking footage that is haunting and very real. After these scenes is where the movie falls into a very tame, boring coast to the end. Reese is hardly in the movie, and doesn’t really help it at all. It was just a very odd format and stuck out as odd.
I think this is rental material for sure. If you want to see it at all. I don’t think you really need to see this one. It doesn’t have anything that is truly worth seeing or is new. It isn’t powerful enough to make it an important movie and it isn’t uplifting enough to go see it to have that feeling of doing good by going to see a movie.
