Nick Lashaway | Through the Shattered Lens

Ronnie Miller (Miley Cyrus), who is 17 and way too rebellious to be likable, travels to Georgia to spend the summer with her father, a former concert pianist named Steve (Greg Kinnear). Ronnie is a sarcastic brat up until she discovers that a racoon is trying to eat a nest of turtle eggs. She tries to protect the turtles. The aquarium sends over a volunteer named Will (Liam Hemsworth) to watch over the turtle eggs and he and Ronnie fall in love over the course of several nights on the beach. Ronnie starts to straighten out her life but then she learns that her father has cancer and that the reason he invited her and her brother to Georgia was so he could have one last summer with her.

This is a Nicholas Sparks story so, of course, someone has to die. I always tell myself that I’m not going to cry whenever I watch a Nicholas Sparks movie and then I do. Greg Kinnear was really likable as Steve and Liam Hemsworth was really cute as Will and I know I would have fallen in love with him too if we were protecting turtle eggs together. When the eggs hatched, the baby turtles were adorable.

It’s too bad Miley Cyrus can’t act because her performance was so bad that it ruined the movie. Even the racoon that tried to steal the turtle eggs outacted her. I got tired of Ronnie and her attitude. No matter what happened, Ronnie had to be sarcastic about it. Even when she finally realized that the world didn’t revolve around her, Miley still delivered all of her lines in the same flat, smartass tone of voice so I didn’t buy her change of heart at all.

I’m glad the turtles made it back to the ocean.

The 2016 film, Prayer Never Fails, tells the story of Aiden Paul (Nick Lashaway). Having survived a traumatic childhood that was full of abuse, Aiden is now the beloved basketball coach at the local high school. (The fact that he never shaves or gets his hair out of his face does not seem to be a problem as far as this school district is concenred.) When one of his players approaches Aiden and tell him that he’s being abused by his father (Lorenzo Lamas), Aiden suggests that the player pray on it. When the player says that he doesn’t know how to pray (because his father is not just abusive but also a hardcore atheist, of course), Aiden takes him into a classroom and teaches him how.

Unfortunately, another teacher sees Aiden and the player praying and reports Aiden to the principal. Aiden is fired from his position. Though Aiden says that he’s just going to give up and find another job, his players demand that Aiden fight to be reinstated. Aiden decides to take the school to court!

Unfortunately, there aren’t any lawyers that Aiden can afford. (And most lawyers would hopefully be ethical enough tell Aiden that, regardless of his good intentions, he doesn’t have a case.) Finally, a chance meeting at a diner leads to Aiden hiring Michael Brown (Clifton Davis), an agnostic lawyer with a gambling problem. Michael takes the case but he soon finds himself going up against master litigator Joseph T. Harrington (Corbin Bernsen). Can Michael somehow win the case?

This is another one of those Christian courtroom films where no one does anything that makes sense. For instance, it seems like, instead of ducking into an open classroom for a quick prayer, Aiden could have reported that one of his students was being abused by a parent, which is something that, as a teacher, he would have been required to do in the first place. (Instead, that subplot is abandoned after Aiden is fired.) As well, to win the case, all Joseph T. Herrington had to do was 1) point out that Aiden had admitted to leading a prayer in school and 2) call to the stand a Constitutional law expert to explain the establishment clause. Instead, Herrington puts the entire concept of prayer on trial and tries to argue that praying doesn’t work. It’s an argument based purely on emotion and bias, which allows Michael to make a counter-argument that’s based purely on emotion and bias. At one point, Michael interrogates the school’s principal as to why he was willing to defend a transgender teacher but not Aiden’s right to pray. The correct answer, of course, is that whether or not another teacher is transgender has nothing to do with Aiden’s case and that the Supreme Court has ruled that prayer is not allowed in public schools. That’s really all anyone needed to say to any of Michael’s arguments but no one does because, if they did, it would be a very short film.

(Along with the dubious legal arguments, this film annoyed me because Aiden didn’t ever bother to shave or comb his hair before the trail began. I mean, seriously, did someone tell him that it was a good strategy to go to court looking like you spend the previous week sleeping in the back of a pickup truck? I would not want him coaching my school’s basketball team.)

On the plus side, Eric Roberts is in this movie. He plays the judge and goes through the film with a bemused smile on his face, as if even he can’t believe the legal arguments that he’s hearing. It’s always nice to see Eric Roberts picking up a paycheck.

Previous Eric Roberts Films That We Have Reviewed: