One supposes Nicholas Sparks will eventually get around to making his Kramer vs. Kramer or Little Man Tate, but until that happens, we’ll have to make do with Gifted.Wilson Webb
One supposes Nicholas Sparks will eventually get around to making his Kramer vs. Kramer or Little Man Tate, but until that happens, we'll have to make do with Gifted.
This is unfortunate, because while the drama is handsome and watchable (with fine dialogue, honest performances and a precocious child actress who plays a precocious child without being overly precocious about it), the flow is mechanical and its heartstring-pulling as obvious as writing in an adorable one-eyed tabby named Fred. (And, not to give too much away, there's an adorable one-eyed tabby named Fred. But you probably saw that coming.)
From Spider-Man director Marc Webb, Gifted stars a delightful Mckenna Grace as a spunky six-year-old math whiz who inherited her late mother's genius for numbers. Her aristocratic grandmother and beach-loving bachelor uncle have different ideas on how to raise the prodigy, thus setting up an inevitable custody battle. The resolution of that conflict is dishonestly implausible, thus ruining a perfectly mediocre movie. The worst of it is that Fred the one-eyed cat was probably winking at us the whole time.
Brad Wheeler