There's a scene where city girl Maggie Grace (visiting father Tom Selleck in the country goes into a deep pond after saying some genuinely nasty things to a teen boy, and I couldn't resist the temptation to scream "Let her drown!" This comes after she poisons a cow which has to be uthenized because of her angry evil deeds and her tantrum for being left by mother Wendy Crewson so she doesn't have to deal with her rebellious daughter for a summer. Selleck is engaged to neighbor Anna Gunn who has problems with her own teen daughter, so there's lots of high pitched yelling as the two join forces, and we're supposed to believe that kindness and patience are the only ways to deal with this situation.
The beauty of the countryside should be a nice distraction for the unpleasant story, but it isn't because outside of Gunn, none of these characters are really believable or likeable. It's a family drama with a Christian theme, but there is nothing spiritually uplifting about this plotline or the message it tries to present. By half an hour into the film, I desperate wanted this to be over. Selleck seems barely involved, seemingly just there for a country vacation with a paycheck. I've lived in the country and often found the silence to be deafening, but being a viewer of this angry teen movie made me prefer deafness to sound.
The beauty of the countryside should be a nice distraction for the unpleasant story, but it isn't because outside of Gunn, none of these characters are really believable or likeable. It's a family drama with a Christian theme, but there is nothing spiritually uplifting about this plotline or the message it tries to present. By half an hour into the film, I desperate wanted this to be over. Selleck seems barely involved, seemingly just there for a country vacation with a paycheck. I've lived in the country and often found the silence to be deafening, but being a viewer of this angry teen movie made me prefer deafness to sound.