The Book of Henry: Review

You could run me over with your car, piss on my mangled body, light my house on fire, and I would only be slightly less offended than I am right now.

The Book of Henry is bad, like really fucking bad. But it's a different kind of "bad" than what you would expect for your average bad movie. It is so horribly and hilariously misguided in every sense of the word. Heavy and depressing subject matter such as child abuse, cancer, murder, and even suicide are discovered here but you can't do shit like that when the central tone of your film is fucking whimsical, like a classic 80's kids movie brand of whimsical. The acting is fine but I found each and every character to be either annoying or cartoonishly unrealistic. I already hate the uber-smart kid movie trope, but it's dialed up so extremely here that it made a good portion of this film totally unbearable. And don't even fucking get me started on how overplayed and grating Jacob Tremblay's cute kid act is here. All in all, this is one of the most singularly frustrating, annoying and unbearable experiences of the year so far and there are so many fucking moronic things that happen throughout the film that left my jaw on the floor in dumbfounded stupid amazement and they are all somehow played totally straight including the absurd and obvious epiphany that hits our main character in the third act.

But somehow, even after finding just about everything in this movie repulsive, I found some respect for Colin Trevorrow as a filmmaker. With the hot and heavy backlash that this film has garnered, I half expected him to keep quiet or give some half-assed excuse like Alex Kurtzman recently did. But no, Trevorrow stands by the film that he made and admits that he is saddened by the largely unfavorable reviews and I respect the shit out of his honesty. It's his film through and through and while I hate it, he made a film that is genuinely unlike anything I've ever seen in my life and there will certainly be those who really do like this and more power to them for that. And it's because of this that I won't give this film half a star.

Trevorrow seems like a nice guy that just had no idea what the fuck to do with this particular film, maybe it all worked out in his head better than it did on screen, I will never know but for me right now, this is one of the most unbelievably awful films of the year and it must be seen so that one can form their own opinion on this whimsical smart kid gets cancer family murder plot film. It's an utter disaster that at least holds your interest. (2.5/10)

Side-Note: This is my 100th movie of 2017! Yay?!