Try to think of the last terrible film that you’ve seen. Congratulations, you’ve just pictured Pay It Forward! I thought that the film looked underwhelming and potentially bad from the trailer, but I was still not prepared for the total and utter trainwreck that this turned out to be. We’re talking Sucker Punch and Daredevil levels of bad here folks so strap in and get ready as this film had no positives about it!

That’s good though since we can skip that part. The movie is about the concept of paying it forward. Essentially, what that means is that you will do something nice for someone and that person will return the favor by helping out enough strangers. If we lived in a Utopia world with no bad guys, then eventually everyone would be helping each other out. How such a nice message could get mixed up like this is beyond me, but Pay It Forward manages to pull this off.

Trevor is the main kid of this film and he comes up with the Pay It Forward idea. He tries to help by bringing a homeless person into his house. It may be a nice thought, but a really naive one and it only worked out because the guy happened to be a nice person. That’s…definitely not how things would usually go. He then decides to help his teacher by trying to get him together with his mom. That’s where most of the trainwreck is.

Eugene is the teacher and he doesn’t want to get into romance. He likes his simple life as it helps him to know what he should expect each day. He continues to deny the advances until Trevor tells him that he basically has to fall in love with Arlene (The mother) or else bad things will happen to the main characters as Trevor’s dad is abusive and a drunk. So…there goes Eugene’s choice. Whether he knows it or not, the choice has been taken out of his hands as he definitely can’t just leave with a clear conscience. The iffy way that the romance was handled was definitely terrible.

Naturally, the alcoholic father part was another unnecessary addition to try and make the film a little more grim-dark. This film was really pushing that for the Oscar bait as the mom had to work at a strip club to earn her salary and there were bullies who beat up on the other kids and nobody would report them. So much for the teachers and other students right? Get ready for some spoilers, not that it matters for a film like this. To really show that this film would not have a happy ending, the writers decided to let the bullies win for once as they kill Trevor. Yeah…the bullies actually came out on top with no ramifications. We can assume that they were given a slap on the wrist and taken to juvie since the teacher and mom saw them, but that was a pretty lousy way to end the film. Actually, slight update. According to Wikipedia, the bullies are seen at the funeral. Yeah…I guess they just got a reeeeeally slight slap on the wrist and I doubt anyone actually believes that they are sincere about this action. Having them at the funeral is just insulting to be honest.

For most of the movie, I had been planning on giving it 2 stars. Even without the ending it was pretty bad so a 2 felt fair, but then the ending happened and I quickly bumped it down to a 0. It’s like the film no longer had any point so it and it was almost trying to discourage people from using the Pay it Forward technique in real life. It’ll never reach everyone, but it’s still nice to help people out. This film basically just shows that you’ll probably get killed for it.

For more grim-dark, Arlene’s mother is homeless and is also an alcoholic. This is relevant because….well, it’s not. The film just gave us these extra plots for the lols and to show us just how tough Trevor’s life is. We already got that though. For extra drama, Trevor decides not to try and work through the situation with his mom, but run away instead. Trevor wasn’t a likable character in this film from the start and I still think that kids can’t hold their own movies, but this just made him look even worse. If the main characters hadn’t found him in time, he would have been done for as a bad guy as waiting at the airport. Can’t let any of the strangers be nice guys once you leave the neighborhood right? So, this essentially means that none of the characters are likable. None of them are even close to being likable either.

Wait, I forgot another grim-dark subplot! Eugene’s face and a lot of his body was burned by his father who was also alcoholic and abusive. The film decided to really throw these plots at us and never let up for a second. There was never a feel good moment in the film as it was all just really dark and terrible. It’s sad that films like this still come out in theaters. Straight to TV is fine so we can all skip it and give each other a thumbs up, but this film really had no quality.

I’m not going to say that it is the worst film of all time, but it’s certainly one of the worst films out there. You can’t go lower than a 0 right? While it is not as grim-dark and winceworthy as Sucker Punch or overly dark and violent like Daredevil, it uses a mixture of those things to get to how bad this film is. If this ever does get a remake, I think it would be better, but I don’t see it being very good at all.

We can’t even blame the genres for this as Pay It Forward is a romance drama. Those two genres are tough to get right, but it is possible. If anything, the film should have just went for more of a light theme. That would have worked much better with the plot and it certainly would have been appropriate. I was half expecting some animal violence by the end just so the film could cover all of the bases. It had the forced romance and all of the dark themes so one more area wouldn’t have hurt right? I was pretty surprised to see Trevor get stabbed on screen as violence against kids is severely frowned upon, but I’m guessing that this film wanted to be controversial so it could be on the news or something. Well, I’m pretty sure that it failed since nobody talks about this film anymore.

Overall, Stay away from this film. This is the kind of title that makes Pixels look like an utter masterpiece. Seriously, Pixels is a thousand times better than this film and I gave it a very low rating as well. At least that film has some fun moments and good action scenes. Pay It Forward has nothing so it just ends up being a boring ride where you will be counting the minutes until it’s over. If you want to see a film with a lot of drama and action, check out Yugioh 3D Bonds Beyond Time instead. You can thank me later!

Overall 0/10