Michael Caine does a soft-shoe shuffle at KFC and Christopher Walken rocks out in the desert.
Those are your money shots in Around the Bend, a small, unassuming, practically incidental character study of male-bonding and forgiveness among four generations of one family's Y-chromosome carriers. (Walken choosing between regular and extra-crispy is also fairly smile-worthy.)
This low-rent road flick/paean to Kentucky Fried Chicken (which hosts several scenes) has thief and ex-druggie dad Walken returning to visit his own dying daddy (Caine) and tentatively reunite with his grown son (Josh Lucas), whom he abandoned years before, after, we're told, a car crash gave sonny boy a permanent limp and killed his mom. (Weepy yet, guys?)
Caine exits early—a shame, given that his daffy, KFC-lovin' old bird, drawn in brief, bold acting strokes, is Bend's most watchable character. But before he goes, he jump-starts the plot, leaving funeral instructions for his son, grandson and great-grandson (Jonah Bobo) to spread his ashes, a little at a time, throughout the Southwest, with demands to share meals at KFC.
Off they go in Walken's beat-up orange-and-white VW van to incrementally bury the crazy coot and resolve Walken's abandonment and Lucas' resentment, with the requisite twist-finale revelation.
Can they retie the frayed ends of a family circle come undone? Yeah, yeah, and so on, and so on.
Underneath the clunky combo of cloying sentimentality, labored comic relief (leaving a turkey sandwich at a grave site) and unchecked bathos, there's Walken, electroshock hair at full salute. Even emotionally tamped down, he is an absorbing presence, and we follow where he leads, even if the script leads him, and us, to essentially nowhere.
Writer-director Jordan Roberts, basing his 100-minute movie on the absentee father he barely knew, sabotages himself by creating quirky stick figures assigned behavior and dialogue to advance the story, instead of fallible, flesh-and-bone people. This is the type of movie where the son's pronounced limp is a visual shorthand reminder of The Moment That Drove Father and Son Apart.
Rather than experience their pain, loss and forgiveness, we're force-fed Pain, Loss and Forgiveness, learning lessons about Family.
And Glenne Headly as a Danish nurse with a horror-flick fetish? Did she escape from another script?
Around the Bend is a Lifetime weepie made for the wrong gender and a smaller screen.