0/10
I tried to watch this one with an open mind, but it felt like the movie was fighting me the entire way. Starting with the protagonist Oscar, who may be the most irritating character since Jar Jar Binks and I say that with no hyperbole whatsoever. Oscar lost his dad in the 9/11 attacks and according to the movie, this is all we need to feel unending sympathy for him - despite the fact that he's obnoxious, rude, and downright unlikeable in almost every scene he's in. Losing a parent is tragic, but when it's used as lazy screenwriting shorthand, its impact is greatly diminished. One starts to wonder why Oscar deserved such a great dad in the first place.
But that's par for the course in a movie where no one acts like a human being, save maybe for Oscar's charming/dorky dad, played by Tom Hanks. The rest are a compilation of screen writing clichés, either with quirks that are supposed to be somehow endearing, or devoid of logic altogether (the explanation for why Oscar's mom lets her 12 year old son traipse around New York either by himself or in the company of a mute recluse is truly mindboggling and hilarious).
The movie's use of the 9/11 attacks to wrench an emotional response out of viewers is manipulative, but generally inoffensive for most of the running time...until at the very end, after Oscar finally comes to terms with the fact that his father is gone and won't be coming back and this is something that he'll have to live with (reflecting indeed the lives of many children who lost their parents in the attacks, a rare moment of realistic human feeling in the film). Immediately after coming to this conclusion he finds a note his father had hidden all along for him, congratulating and confirming his pride in and love for his son, providing him with a measure of closure that virtually no child who actually is in Oscar's situation ever benefitted from. It's cheap, cloying, and downright offensive, and makes an already bad movie that much more worthy of contempt.
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