The Mighty

Director: Peter Chelsom
Cast:
Sharon Stone
Elden Ratliff
Kieran Culkin
Gena Rowlands
Harry Dean Stanton
Genre: Drama

Sometimes a movie comes along that really does force you to balance your emotional checkbook. By this I mean that "The Mighty" has so many great moments in it, that you have to weigh them seriously against the moments that made you want to throw your Goobers at the screen. Like every movie sliding down the Hollywood Hills these days, this flick would have been a lot better if they had kept the schmaltz tightly bottled in a waterproof seal and let us, the audience, decide whether we wanted to cry or not.

Kieran Culkin, Mac's more-talented little brother, stars as "Freak," a kid stricken with a terminal illness that has made him hunched over and reliant on walking braces. Elden Henson is our hero Max, a boy massive enough to draw the ire of every kid in school.

Together, they form a perfect symbiosis; Freak can use Max's legs to accomplish his leitmotif of Arthurian heroism, and Max can use Freak's brain to think his way out of his awful social predicament.

There's a lot of scary stuff in here about Max's father coming back to torture him, and Gillian Anderson's accent is a cross between her X-Files lisp and a trailer twang, but if you can avoid the Easy Cheese and concentrate on the seamlessly beautiful friendship between Max and Freak, you've got yourself a movie. Throw in a dutifully upset Sharon Stone as Freak's protective mother, and you might even have the price of admission.

With Gena Rowlands and Harry Dean Stanton.

—Ian Williams

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