joeyg-149-99444

This is a heartbreaking story, it is but.... Let's start with the positives. I will admit, I teared up a few times, partly because I knew it was a true story and partly because of the great portrayal of Kennedy by Tatum. She played the part very well from "normal" until the end. I also thought the acting from the rest of the teenager was fairly good, not great, but they made their scenes believable. However, the adults...not so much, and I'm gonna blame that mostly on a poorly written script. Okay, so obviously I'm out of the positives so let's continue. Kennedy's parents were the best of the adults, but they didn't feel invested and for most of their scenes, it seemed like they were just there. The only time I felt like either was a parent was the driving scene near the beginning where the dad was driving with little Kennedy and was swerving to make Kennedy not be able to drink from her straw, that felt real-ish. The script was very lackluster with a few good moments. Unfortunately it was more Mormon propaganda than story (I get the family and the community are Mormon and highly religious...it's Utah...I get it) but there is a way to balance it that unfortunately all Christian productions can't seem to grasp. I'm not bothered by religious based movies/stories, I'm just turned off to blatant in your face propaganda disguised as heartwarming/heartbreaking movie. There was nothing indicating this going into it, though it became fairly obvious fairly quickly. Moving on...The camera work was bad and took away from what story there was. Honestly, this was the first give away that it was a Christian/religious movie (also a problem with Christian propaganda movies is poor filming, bad lighting, bad angles, etc).

Anyway, all in all, it was watchable, I learned about disease I didn't know about and the story of a girl that despite all of it, still tried to succeed at living while dying.

Seriously, it would have been a better movie if they tried to make it bad. At least then it would be ironic. There is literally nothing about this that is good. Not a single "actor" can act. Every line delivered was like they were a high school kid who got called on to read in class. Monique's French accent was so terrible it was funny. The worst of them all was Boone. The terrible script didn't help either. Also, I get that fan fiction is not a copyright violation but using copyrighted music is 100% infringement. Putting them in the credits and saying "all music used without permission" does not bypass copyright laws. It's a good think YouTube takes care of that. But considering I'm the first review of this in the 10-15 years this has been made, I don't think anyone is watching it anyway. Garbage.