"Pay It Forward" is pure schmaltz. The movie's premise is nothing more than the brain-child of some Hallmark card writer, tugging at the heartstrings with movie-of-the-week precision.
The only things that keep this movie from being shelved beside "Touched by an Angel" are Kevin Spacey and Haley Joel Osment's brilliant performances.
Schoolteacher Eugene Simonet (Spacey) gives a yearlong homework assignment on the first day of class: come up with an idea that can change the world.
One of the class members, Trevor (Osment) concocts the utopian idea of "paying it forward," an effective pyramid-type scheme in which someone repays an act of kindness by passing the good deed onto three other people, and so on and so forth. Before you know it, of course, Trevor is feeding and housing the homeless.
Trevor's alcoholic single mom, Arlene (Helen Hunt), a trailer-trash stereotype right down to the badly permed hair and tacky fingernails, is initially enraged by Simonet's idealistic inspiration.
But, true to the movie's sappy nature, Trevor is soon paying it forward to the physically scarred and excessively introverted Mr. Simonet by arranging a date between him and Arlene.
It seems a movie with two Oscar-winning actors among its cast couldn't go wrong, but somewhere it manages to get horribly off track. The sappy screenplay doesn't exactly help - the film's problem is that the audience is never able to feel any emotions on its own. Every emotion and every cliched phrase is shoved mercilessly down the audience's throat.
The film seems to be a blatant bid for an Oscar, filled with characters whose lives are depressingly hopeless. They're the classic Hollywood archetypes of the troubled kid, the hooker with a heart of gold and the man whose physical scars mirror his emotional ones.
