Review: ‘The Unbreakable Boy’ is a movie for people who do not watch movies, and that’s fine, I guess

Few might be aware of The Unbreakable Boy‘s journey from pre-production to release, and just as well, because it’s one that defies any immediate explanation. After being announced, starting filming, and wrapping it all in late 2020, the film was due to release on March 18, 2022. Then, a week before its then-scheduled theatrical bow, it was pulled from the release calendar and went dark for nearly three years.

It’s out in theaters now, but the question remains; why did The Unbreakable Boy — a faith-relevant biographical drama about a young boy with autism and brittle bone disease, so thematically platitudinal and pathologically inoffensive that it slots into the Kingdom Story Company pantheon without an ounce of fuss — suddenly disappear without explanation? What about this specific story could have possibly spooked the Lionsgate brass to bench its most inconsequential player?

In case you haven’t caught on, these questions are more interesting than The Unbreakable Boy itself, though that’s less the fault of the film and more a result of films like it being so meticulously skewed for a specific demographic, that making it the subject of critique is about as moot as one can get. Even so, a landing was far from stuck here.

Based on Scott Michael LeRette’s and Susy Flory’s memoir of the same name, The Unbreakable Boy stars Zachary Levi as the very same Scott, the father of sons Logan and the energetic Austin (Jacob Laval, an excellent young performer), the latter of whom was born with brittle bone disease and is on the autism spectrum. The film chronicles the trials and tribulations faced by the family, from hospital visits to life at school to Scott’s and his wife Teresa’s (Meghann Fahy) marriage, and, of course, Scott’s and Austin’s father-son bond.

Now, I’m not going to sit here and insinuate that the intentions behind The Unbreakable Boy‘s approach were deliberately insincere. There is, for instance, a life behind its eyes that’s absent from the streaming-original, TikTok-friendly slop currently populating Netflix, and it possesses a visual comelyness that isn’t quite cinematic, but not decidedly incompetent either. By all appearances, this film is interested in existing.

However, for a film called The Unbreakable Boy, it certainly seems determined to spend more time with Austin’s struggling parents than with him. Indeed, we become intimate with Scott’s alcoholism, insecurities about fatherhood, and his imaginary friend Joe (Drew Powell), while Teresa finds herself overwhelmed in her role as a stay-at-home mom and from resurfaced family trauma. What the film makes most apparent, though, is that these two love Austin very much, unique parental challenges and all.

But it’s 2025. Surely to God, we’re past the point where it’s considered profound or inspiring to love and accept your child for who they are, or where it’s considered reasonable for on-screen portrayals of autism to primarily serve as vehicles of self-actualization for neurotypical adults. Austin breaks the fourth wall via voiceover and narrates a bit of his life to us in the film’s first half, but with so much focus put on Scott and Teresa, one really can’t help but read that as the film trying to hide behind him. What monster, after all, would dare critique a film about this sweet little boy?

So why not actually make it about Austin, then? What’s his story? What are his fears and aspirations? What does he want? What does he need? What, from his perspective, is significant about moving through the world with autism and osteogenesis imperfecta? What’s the thematic core of his journey, and how will that best be captured in the medium of cinema?

Could it be that the brain trust of The Unbreakable Boy are simply not talented enough storytellers or empaths to examine these questions and perspectives with the nuance they deserve, and had no intention to even do that in the first place? The film’s elementary, milquetoast handling of topics like marriage, bullying, and guilt certainly suggests the former, and its patronizing narrative angle suggests the latter. Indeed, it’s easy to point a camera at an innocent child and widely relatable vulnerabilities so as to reap the benefits of that innocence and vulnerability, but it’s much harder to make a good movie built upon truly insightful emotional resonance and ideas.

And yet, I’m genuinely not sure if writer-director Jon Gunn and the Kingdom Story Company producing heads know this or not. The Unbreakable Boy does not exist for movie theaters — if it exists for anyone, it’s the real-life LeRette family. A filmic rendition of their experiences together — experiences that I’ve no doubt are every bit as richly and complexly humanistic as The Unbreakable Boy is not.

But if you’re going to display something like this to wider audiences — many of whom do not traffic in the bubble (and let’s face it; it absolutely is a bubble) of faith movies — you can’t be so naive as to think that innocuous sentimentality is going to do the trick. Film and other such media inform cultural discussions — people talk about movies, and audiences are far smarter than most give them credit for. They’re not going to leave the theater feeling inspired by The Unbreakable Boy. They may find it unobjectionable, even fleetingly charming, but without a true creative leg to stand on, what was really the goal of shuffling this one into cinemas? Money? Impact? Artistic hubris? None of these seem likely. An easy vehicle for advertising traditional family values and a gratuitous bible shoutout, together with an honest but fundamentally misguided belief in the script? Certainly more likely than the other three.

In summary, The Unbreakable Boy is not a very good movie in any sense of the word, but that’s also like saying that I, a Canadian, am not a very good citizen of Japan. The circles that The Unbreakable Boy is supposed to be walking in are deeply unconcerned with the end goal of making strong movies — it’s almost as if this film got lost and unwittingly wandered into the cinema while it was in transit to a $20 church group screening. I have little trouble believing that The Unbreakable Boy was made specifically for that church group setting, and to subsequently affirm viewers’ good citizenship while perhaps prompting them to pat themselves on the back for empathizing with Austin.

Instead, The Unbreakable Boy has found itself competing with the thoroughly un-Christian The Monkey for box office supremacy. It will probably lose, and then promptly fade from the zeitgeist, after which we will forever be none the wiser as to why this movie was axed from its original 2022 release date without warning, and why it has resurfaced now. Then, one day, that mystery will be solved, and someone will make a movie about it, and it will be on par with The Unbreakable Boy.