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Kirk Cameron's second attempt at major big screen stardom in Listen To Me was as unsuccessful as his first Like Father, Like Son. Kirk could never translate the popularity he had as Mike Seaver on Growing Pains to films. Despite the fact that this film in its story and rather muddled message is close to his personal beliefs.
Cameron plays Tucker Muldowney former reform school inmate from Oklahoma who turned his life around and now is going to a prestigious but small college named Kenmont in California. Kenmont's claim to fame is that they have a debate team with the best coach in the country in Roy Scheider. Cameron's won a scholarship to Kenmont in debate. Debate in that school holds the same place that football does in most colleges if you can believe that.
Among the students the debate kingpin is Tim Quill, son of United States Senator Anthony Zerbe, a kid with a future all mapped out for him that he really doesn't want. He and Cameron have a rivalry for the other debate scholarship winner Jami Gertz, a smart young woman from Chicago with a problem in relationships.
Listen To Me goes as far as it can with its message without crossing over into the overtly religious domain of fundamentalist Christianity. The liberal elite is represented by the Harvard Debate Team of Tom Schanley and Christopher Rydell and Middle America where Kirk Cameron preaches a new moral attitude in his closing remarks.
The finale is the championship debate on abortion which is before five of the justices of the Supreme Court as if those people haven't anything better to do. When Gertz tells her own story and talks about how women are taking human life in terminating a pregnancy, the haughty Harvard liberals sneer at her appeal to base emotionalism. You're programmed to hate these guys and what they stand for.
Now if I was writing the film the other way we might just drag up stories of people who had back alley abortions before the Supreme Court legalized it in Roe vs. Wade. Tales of death, of permanent health problems resulting from such horrors also abound.
My own view is that no woman of any kind of substantial character approaches that kind of decision in a cavalier manner, no matter what the choice she makes. And after all the issue is indeed about choice.
The cast is an appealing all middle American one, the kind who would also be joining the College Republicans. If you're politics are in that sphere, Listen To Me is the film for you.
score 4/10
bkoganbing 23 September 2008
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw1950731/ |
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18-2-2021 02:49:06