Radio Flyer (1992)

IMDb plot summary: A father recounts a dark period of his childhood when he and his little brother lived in the suburbs.

Directed by Richard Donner. Starring Lorraine Bracco, Elijah Wood, and Joseph Mazzello.

Radio Flyer tells the story of two little boys whose mother marries an abusive man, and the oldest boy, played by Elijah Wood, contrives a plan to save his younger brother from their stepfather's cruelty. What a strange, confusing tone this is going for, mixing the serious issue of child abuse with an imaginative fantasy in a way that never quite lands. While I won't spoil the details of the ending, it is deeply unsatisfying given how badly we want our characters to get a concrete happy ending, and while the film clearly attempts to end on a positive note, it doesn't really work at all. The two young actors playing the boys are good -- maybe too good in that they sell the narrative of childhood trauma so realistically that it's hard to let it go when the movie wants us to. And the choice to rarely show the abuser's face and keep him as an ominous otherworldly villain would have been effective in a different movie where that was taken more seriously. It's, I think, a well-intentioned film, but it ends up feeling clumsy at best and exploitative at worst.

How it entered my Flickchart:

Radio Flyer < Vampyr

Radio Flyer < 13 Going on 30

Radio Flyer < Table 19

Radio Flyer > Bhoot

Radio Flyer > Courageous

Radio Flyer > The Yellow Handkerchief

Radio Flyer < Sharknado

Radio Flyer > Live Free or Die Hard

Radio Flyer < The Hiding Place

Radio Flyer > Min and Bill

Radio Flyer > Madagascar

Radio Flyer < They Were Expendable

Final spot: #3305 out of 3733, or 11%.