Broken [2006] (REGION 1) (NTSC)

Customer Reviews:

"It was the Christian thing to do".......2007-01-24

This country music extravaganza masquerading as a feel-good down home melodrama starts out quite well, and for while it looks as though we are going to get a decent film. But it doesn't take long to see that predictability rules and what we end up with is a strange little film that is all over the place thematically, eventually turning into a type of country music jamboree featuring Willie Nelson of all people!

Broken Bridges is obviously supposed to be a star vehicle for Country music star Toby Keith (whom I've never heard of), but the film not only has a hokey made for television feel about it and is full of the usual clichés and various subplots that are tossed off and forgotten at a moments notice.

In a movie that is a lot stupider and cornier than it needs to be, Keith stars as Bo Price as a washed-up country music star who now spends his days drinking and playing on local bars. After his brother was one of five young men from the town who lost their lives in a recent military training accident, he returns to his hometown where he meets up with old high school lover Angela Delton (Kelly Preston) and his estranged 16-year-old daughter, Dixie Leigh Delton (Lindsey Haun).

Angela hasn't seen Bo in years - indeed Dixie has never met him, as she ran away to Miami after she found out she was pregnant with Dixie and has never returned. Everyone in the family is affected by the tragedy of the soldiers' death, including Angela's mom (Tess Harper) who welcomes them back, but Angela's dad (Burt Reynolds) wants nothing to do with his daughter or the granddaughter he's never met.

There's some nice moments in Broken Bridges, with the movie attempting to taking a timely look at how military deaths - especially with regard to the Iraq War are affecting families and communities in small towns such as this all across America. Overall, however, much of the proceedings come across as dramatically limp. There's an interesting subplot involving Dixie and a boy who tries to take advantage of her, but it's later dropped in favour of a bunch of feel good scenes where Bo teaches Dixie about music, and takes care of unfinished business with Angela.

Kelly Preston and newcomer Lindsey Haun are the standouts here, but this material is beneath them both. Keith is a bit of a stiff as an actor, and he's not that exiting a singer, and he's also not that attractive. Someone like Tim McGraw would certainly have been much more charismatic in the role.

So instead of a compelling political polemic about the Iraq War - which is what the movie could and should have been - Keith indeed seems quite ambivalent on a subject that we might have expected Bo to make a speech or two about - we get almost two hours of tawdry melodrama where secrets are revealed, the token black friend exposes family skeletons, and one of the characters ends up in hospital suffering from a stroke.

But despite a good cast including Tess Harper and the strange looking Burt Reynolds, Broken Bridges ultimately feels scrapped-together. And because it's so predictable, it doesn't take long for the whole proceedings to come across as shop-worn with a story that ultimately sells itself out. The liveliest thing in the movie is Katie Finneran's town floose, who after all these years, still has designs on Bo. She's not in the film nearly enough! Mike Leonard January 07.

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