Let's Go Out To The Movies: "Max": As American A Picture As There Ever Was (PG - Warner Bros. - 1 hr, 51 mins)

Directed by Boaz Yakin
Written by Boaz Yakin and Sheldon Lettich

Alo Party Peoples.

In the current mass entertainment film making landscape, Max feels like an anachronism. Here's a premise that feels like it could have come straight from Amblin Entertainment in the 80s or from Disney in the 90s, (or from the Disney Channel in the '00s) presented completely straight with total sincerity. You normally don't get away with this level of earnest emotional enthusiasm unless your name is Spielberg and your'e making a a movie about a British army horse during the Great War.

This animal war story comes to us courtesy of Remember The Titans helmer Boaz Yakin, and if Max were in the hands of anyone less skilled at wringing emotional responses out of an audience, it would have fallen apart into self-parody, but Max is a completely "irony" free zone, and as a result it's both a phenomenal family film, and a far better story about veterans adjusting to civilian life than American Sniper could ever hope to be.

To wit, Max is about an all-American military family in suburban Texas. Pamela, a God-fearing compassionate housewife, Ray, a small business owning veteran of the first Iraq War, and their son Justin, a moody teenager that spends his days glued to his computer playing and selling pirated video games. When Justin's brother Kyle dies serving in Afghanistan, the family adopts the titular dog, who is suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, and Justin is the only one that Max feels comfortable being around. As they spend more time together, Max gets Justin to spend more time outside with his peers, and Justin helps Max recover from the horrors of war.

The actors fill their family film archetypes very, very well. The wise old father figure, the matron-saint of a mom, the wisecracking best friends, but the best actor in this film is easily the dog. The reason so many family films are built around dogs, they're an animal that humans, and especially children, tend to immediately empathize with, so having a dog involved in the Afghanistan war both doubles down on that and adds an element that adults will empathize with as well. It's so cannily assembled and well executed that it's enough to make one suspect that Boaz Yakin sacrificed a bald eagle to the Founding Fathers in order to bless the set and make Max the most American motion picture that ever was.

If there's one place where Max does trip up, it's in including a subplot involving Tyler, a man that served with Kyle in Afghanistan that has been selling weapons to a Mexican drug cartel, and is hell bent on having Max put down because... he growled at him when he got home from the service, I guess? Anyways, I don't think this story needed to have a villain, Justin helping Max recover from the horrors of war was more than compelling enough to hang a film on, but it's not like it breaks the movie or anything, it's just one okay element of what is overall a very well executed production.

Max is broad, arch, and it yanks on the heartstrings harder than anything else in recent memory. There's plenty that the Press Irreverent will mock, such as Justin and Max riding a bike together and leaping right into a deliberate homage to E.T, or juxtaposing Kyle fighting off the Taliban with Justin playing a military shooter. But Boaz Yakin really is just that good at this stuff, and everyone from the most God-fearing, red-white-and-blue-blooded patriot, to the most cynical, snarky Rifftrax wannabe in the audience will find themselves tearing up.

Have a nice day.

Greg.B

FINAL RATING: 4.5/5