Breakthrough (2019)

Pretty much everything about Breakthrough is bad. It is a moving cliche as is every character in it. It is filled with bad theology and horrible views on adoption. And worst of all it's just a boring movie.

The story of John Smith (based on real life events) is a series of insultingly cliche moments. He is adopted so therefore he naturally suffers from abandonment issues and his mother is a series of memes about what mothering is supposed to be. When he has his accident and recovers he struggles with the reasons for why he was spared. He comes to his rationalization that he was worth saving because of something good that he did. As if our value as human beings is based on what we can contribute. And as if others die because they can't contribute something valuable enough. Plus there is the whole plot piece about the community coming together to pray for his survival, as if God is somehow making decisions about who lives and who dies based on a prayer tally, similar to "likes" on Facebook. These ideas are an affront to people of faith and to adopted people. It reinforces horribly simplistic efforts to seek meaning in the difficult complicated world we live in. I could go on and on about all that I found insulting about this film from a faith perspective and from an adoption perspective. But instead of all that I'll focus on what a bad movie it is overall.

The story is the kind of afterschool special level of writing and acting which frustrates me when I'm watching it. The characters are two dimensional, each one a stereotype. The film does what I most resent in films. It doesn't build real characters it relies on the stock ideas we each carry with us so that we simply fill in the blanks with each stereotype and know who that person is supposed to be. The film does the same thing with its story. It sets us on a path where we know wxactly what's going to happen and why, simply reinforcing our assumptions for us as we go along instead of pushing us or challenging us. Fitting that it stars This is Us star Chrissy Metz, a show which suffers the same manipulative writing style.

While some my buy into the corny and rather insulting theological aspects of this story I get that I won't be able to convince them of how problematic it is. But beyond that Breakthrough is just bad film making, the kind which doesn't expect anything of its audience.

Breakthrough
Starring: Chrissy Metz, Marcel Ruiz, Jake Lucas, Topher Grace, Mike Colter, Denis Haysbert
Director: Roxann Dawson
Writer: Grant Nieport