An American Hate Crime

This movie is a good example of how bad direction can completely spoil a very important message and a good narrative. For this film, I will not really blame the actors, because I do think they had potential but the direction was bad. It was more theatrical and very amateur, because of which a film that should be more widely seen may not really get the audience.

Jake is a troubled teenage frustrated with life because he feels there is nothing going for him. He gets suspended from community college, has a dish washing job. To top it all the company he keeps is nothing to talk about. The 2 of his friends are homophobic and they convince Jake to join them in homophobic attacks on gays. They download a gay dating app and bash a couple of guys. Jake is not totally convinced but he goes along. On the third attempt, they badly end up beating a young 13 year old boy Noah. We then see Noah's story of how he is coming to terms with his sexuality, and also his first love and how his family has been nothing but super supportive of everything. When Noah goes to hospital after the crime, does Jake find out that the guy his group bashed up is actually his younger brother Noah. The guilt is killing him, so he turns himself to police and his friends get arrested too. After few months, Noah gets better and visits Jake in the jail with his boyfriend and forgives him for his actions.

Like I said, the story was very good and something that needs to be told. But in this case, I feel a docu-drama approach would have been better. Or some changes in screenplay with a better director could have changed things drastically around and would have made a much stringer impact. Hate Crimes are real and they still happen in today's time. There are as many people who hate Gays as there are who support. And the haters can sometimes go to any lengths. So to this, I applaud the makers to deal a delicate subject, but unfortunately they didn't do a very good job of it. It would have been nice to understand why Jake is so angry when he had such a supportive family around him. The entire story of Noah and his love was so cute and it would remind everyone of their teenage crush and love. Both those guys were super cute and they did their part very nicely, so did the mother. Jake's friend were quite annoying; not just as characters but also as actors.

I wish someone makes a more gut wrenching, hard-hitting film on this subject because hate crimes are not going anywhere sadly. Sadly, the bus has been missed in this attempt. Its not an American problem, Things are much worse in other parts of the world and the world just needs to be more tolerant and let people love. (3.5/10)

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