What is the point of this movie? The situations were so artificial that it was difficult to enter the "suspension of belief" mode, despite this movie's attempts to present a realistic scenario.
POTENTIAL SPOILER ALERT!!!
The whole setup, where Affleck, the hotshot Wall St. Esquire, runs into Samuel Jackson, a down on his luck recovering alcoholic who's trying to keep his family from moving to the West Coast, is impossible to accept. Specifically, the premise that Jackson has lost his day in court because he showed up late due to Affleck's having left the scene of the accident is unrealistic. All he had to do was get to a phone and call the police, or just wait for the high probability that a passing motorist would call 911 with a cell phone, get a police report and show it to the judge. He would then have been in a great position to collect big bucks from Affleck's auto insurance and been able to get an even nicer house. Plus Affleck would be in trouble for having left the scene.
Second, I found it impossible to accept that a presumably capable attorney such as Affleck's character would not be so careless as to not have made COPIES of a document as important as the one he left with Jackson. To put it another way, do they really expect us to believe he only had ONE COPY, ESPECIALLY when the person who signed is is DECEASED????
No, I can't accept it. Then the tit for tat thing is old and was done much better, and much more amusingly, by Laurel and Hardy in their famous short, "Tit for Tat".
Many other details were simply too preposterous to accept, such as the private eye/hacker being able to nullify Jackson's credit in just a few keystrokes. Jackson had all sorts of verified documentation. Then the extreme convenience of Affleck's wheel coming off RIGHT ON CUE on the expressway was just too much. But all of this would be moot in light of the problems outlined in the first paragraph. This movie is one of the most gratuitous I've seen in years.
Maybe the point was to ignore these bothersome facts and concentrate on the "morality lesson" the movie attempts to give us, but I just found the whole thing to be silly.....
POTENTIAL SPOILER ALERT!!!
The whole setup, where Affleck, the hotshot Wall St. Esquire, runs into Samuel Jackson, a down on his luck recovering alcoholic who's trying to keep his family from moving to the West Coast, is impossible to accept. Specifically, the premise that Jackson has lost his day in court because he showed up late due to Affleck's having left the scene of the accident is unrealistic. All he had to do was get to a phone and call the police, or just wait for the high probability that a passing motorist would call 911 with a cell phone, get a police report and show it to the judge. He would then have been in a great position to collect big bucks from Affleck's auto insurance and been able to get an even nicer house. Plus Affleck would be in trouble for having left the scene.
Second, I found it impossible to accept that a presumably capable attorney such as Affleck's character would not be so careless as to not have made COPIES of a document as important as the one he left with Jackson. To put it another way, do they really expect us to believe he only had ONE COPY, ESPECIALLY when the person who signed is is DECEASED????
No, I can't accept it. Then the tit for tat thing is old and was done much better, and much more amusingly, by Laurel and Hardy in their famous short, "Tit for Tat".
Many other details were simply too preposterous to accept, such as the private eye/hacker being able to nullify Jackson's credit in just a few keystrokes. Jackson had all sorts of verified documentation. Then the extreme convenience of Affleck's wheel coming off RIGHT ON CUE on the expressway was just too much. But all of this would be moot in light of the problems outlined in the first paragraph. This movie is one of the most gratuitous I've seen in years.
Maybe the point was to ignore these bothersome facts and concentrate on the "morality lesson" the movie attempts to give us, but I just found the whole thing to be silly.....