My Son

McAvoy acting is as ever really good but he's struggling to make any real mark as the script is lacking.

So many interesting details are left hanging.

His background and work is hinted at being involved and then dropped just as quickly. Shame as this really started to make you wonder what was going on? What does he do? Who are these peopke so powerful they can get the highest levels of the Police to shut down investigations? All these are dropped and never mentioned again!? His offices being ransacked in America and hard drives, paperwork etc all confiscated ......why? Never mentioned again.

Absolutely pointless and tragic as it would have made for a much better film if had followed and answered a few questions.

We are left with a simple child abduction ring with no explanation or detail and it goes from one long drawn out scene of walking over terrain to driving in rain to clearly oad out the runtime.

The wife gets hardly any screen time to utilise her acting skills. Her boyfriend acts so odd which isn't explained neither is the fact Ethan (the Son) had no bedroom in the new house?? Why not?

The loose ends didn't work or were ended because didn't know where to go with them in lazy writing or either very badly written red herrings.

McAvoy played it as well as he could. Didn't suddenly become an action hero and fight them all but handled situations realistically and basically just got lucky. Which can happen I guess. The shots of his taking the indirect routes to get to the houses were dragged out and seemingly pointless as his ex got there with no problem.

Massively disappoint film. Especially the ending that just made you feel you'd been cheated.

Lazyily bad writing although good acting, beautiful if dreary landscapes and more questions than answers. In fact was there any answers at all?

Unsure if original was this bad but as same story and director I'm assuming it is......and had even lower feedback scoring.

Avoid.

For a movie that dragged in places the ending was a bit disappointing. Like they couldn't take a few minutes to really sus out everything that was really going on, just a quick de-brief in a car ride and no explanation of what happened with his job.

'My Son' is an ok film for a one-time watch. It looks neat, McAvoy is consistently good, there are some tense scenes (although very dark), and the score is memorable.

Yet it's still 5/10 because the story is just too loose. More than half of the things they establish go nowhere while the resolution just turns up from nowhere. So many plot threads just get abandoned constantly taking you out of the film, there's nothing to grasp on to. It's ok to mislead your viewers if you do it in a clever way, provide hints, well, at least something. Here it's just random. Some of the scenes also felt stretched out to meet the required run-time, I have no other explanation, lots of walking, running, sitting, driving...

The ending credits also mention that this is an adaptation of Mon garçon, a French film of the same name from 2017. But how can it be an adaptation if it's directed by the same guy? It's like he just made the same film twice, and the first one isn't much better probably because it's rated even lower.

It's watchable, but only if there is nothing else to see.

I wanted to love it so much, but I just couldn't. Claire is more than good, James is trying, as we know he wasn't given a script and he does what he can, but it clearly doesn't add anything to the movie. And there's a story, we've seen a few times before, nothing new under the Sun. Unfortunately, just another average movie.

... there's just not a lot in this film to become emotionally or intellectually intrigued... the two leads do a decent job with what they're given, but overall it's really nothing more than how most people are rating it.