Around the Bend

For the most part, I prefer "small" films, ones centering on human relationships, to the blockbusters that rule the North American cinema houses. On the other hand, after watching Around the Bend, a story about the troubled relations between four generations of men, I was kind of wishing it had been set on an exploding space station in the Andromeda galaxy. The manipulative story and sappy, platitude-laden dialogue bog down this tale of a man who finds himself uncomfortably reunited with the father he hasn’t seen in 30 years. Christopher Walken does his Christopher Walken routine, which is fun, and Michael Caine turns in a good bit as an aging archaeologist, but the acting can’t save this one from the script, which reads like Raymond Carver filtered through the book of Proverbs. Warning: Your heart will be non-consensually warmed!