Foreverland: Movie Review

Dragging out a road trip to eventually get to an interesting place in life.

“Foreverland” is a relationship drama road trip movie. And I know what you’re thinking, you’ve seen it before. Yes, pretty much, but it does have some refreshing twists even though it takes them too long to get there. It starts with Will (Max Thieriot) a young man with cystic fibrosis shopping for coffins. He has that twisted sense of humour which we’re supposed to find endearing.		2011 Directed by: Max McGuire Screenplay by: Shawn Riopelle, Max McGuire Starring: Max Thieriot, Laurence Leboeuf
The opening screams of every death-related movie and TV show out there and the unoriginality does not bode well for the upcoming road trip. Will’s fellow CF-sufferer and best friend, Bobby (Thomas Dekker), has died so Will is in a lawyer’s office listening to the details of Bobby’s will. The dialogue is well written so we are keen to hear what Bobby has done. His final wishes are for Will to drive his ashes to a healing shrine in Mexico. The healing shrine is this fabled rumour that the patients are dying to find out about. Will and the viewers are reasonably skeptical. So now Will, and through some contrived romantic drama rule, Bobby’s sister Hannah (Laurence Leboeuf), are driving down the Pacific Highway in a personally meaningful, but likely to break-down, home-built car. Everything that is supposed to occur on a road trip occurs. The pace of the film is slower than Will and Hannah’s travelling speed when they’re sitting on the side of the road bonding. It would be great if we could just skip that whole hour and just go from Vancouver to Mexico. (Like if there were these steel mechanical birds which you could just buy a ticket for and they would fly you from one city to another covering great distance in little time.) Once they arrive at the healing shrine, or rather, arrive at the nearest town to the healing shrine, we meet Oscar-nominated actor Damián Bichir. He provides some much needed humour (which isn’t too surprising because the dialogue is well-written) and he eventually leads Will and Hannah to the healing shrine. And we also finally have some interesting emotional and psychological conflicts, not just physical ones, and there’s even a magical air to the film when we start thinking that maybe the healing shrine really is a healing shrine and not just a hole in the ground. “Foreverland” has some great dialogue with decent to excellent acting and some interesting things to think about at the end. It’s just too bad that it took forever to get there incorporating every cliché dramatic element along the way.