Release Date:
Tuesday, March 27, 2007
If there's ever been a more blatant movie-of-the-week done on a blockbuster level, we haven't see it. We usually hate that junk. But we did see Happyness, which is an outrageously sappy story of a down-on-his-luck daddy working for the American dream. Will Smith makes it much better than the source material could possibly hope for as Chris Gardner, as does his real-life son Jaden, but it's not enough to lift this from the Oxygen prime-time lineup. Perhaps if they hadn't devoted 98 percent of the movie to him getting his ass kicked from one bad situation to another we would have enjoyed it more. While it's trying to prove that anyone can go from rags to riches, it all comes down to the real-life Chris Gardnerwho comes across as a really cool guy in the extrashaving the strength to overcome hardships that destroy average folks on a daily basis. No lessons here except definitive proof of how unmotivated we truly are.