Audio By Carbonatix
There are a million movies exactly like it: Promising athlete encounters diversity, gets discouraged, gets encouraged, overcomes diversity, wins something and everybody learns important lessons about life, family and love. That was my main point on Friday when I made fun of the trailer for Soul Surfer, a movie so paint-by-the-numbers hackneyed I predicted the entire course of events in about 100 words. But apparently, like its protagonist, Soul Surfer‘s got some folks gunning for it — like reader Ashley, who points out, as many others did, that my arguments are invalid because the movie is a biopic.
No shit you know what would happen! It was in the headlines for months! And carrie underwood chose to branch out, so what?! Obviously people didn’t have an issue with it since its making a ton of money and getting good reviews. Geeze…
And this from Abby Wainright:
Um, based on the fact that it’s a true story that was big news a few years ago, I wasn’t surprised that I knew what was going to happen. I’m sorry if it upset you that you predicted a shark attack in a movie based on a true story of a shark attack victim.
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With all due respect, though, so what? There’s a million other Hollywood vehicles based on inspirational true stories, and they’re all somehow identical to this one (I’m guessing the actual stories aren’t). Unless the movie differs radically from the trailer, Soul Surfer is a phoned-in, cynical, perfunctory piece of crap, and it makes no sense to me to argue that its being based on a true story makes that better — in fact, I’d argue it’s worse.
