Tyson’s Run is a movie of warm feelings and blatant emotional cues, which has a couple of strong performances and a good number of contrivances attempting to prop up some false drama. Everything about the movie is basic, from its attempt to offer a window into the mind of its young protagonist to its bland visual language. It’s too well-meaning to be offensive, but it also doesn’t strain to be more than competently there, on the screen, not really engaging with its audience.
Tyson (Major Dodson) is autistic, a fact which Bass underlines in bold italics, in terms of defining the character entirely by the condition. Only by accident, it seems, does either Dodson or Bass acknowledge how intelligent Tyson is about the world around him. It’s most apparent in a moment, just before the major conflict of the film heats up, where Tyson seems to understand that his parents Bobby (Rory Cochrane) and Eloise (Amy Smart) have been arguing about his place in each of their lives and calls it out at the dinner table.
This scene, so well-played by all three actors, displays the type of gentle observation that much of the rest of the film lacks. It’s telling, by the way, that the scene immediately precedes the third instance in which Tyson runs away to prove something to himself, his parents, and the audience. More specifically, Tyson wants to be a runner, an aspiration that develops out of a friendship with Aklilu (Barkhad Abdi), who helps on the football field where Bobby is a coach of both renown and skill. Tyson wishes to learn how to run alongside the fastest runners in the sport, and Aklilu, with his past achievements in the sport (complicated by a minor revelation that seems calculated, for some reason, to make us doubt his sincerity), is the key.
Bobby isn’t so sure he wants to thrust his son into a highly competitive situation just yet, which is more than enough conflict to throw at an audience (the movie also gives us a romantic interest for Tyson, played by Layla Felder, in a sweet-enough subplot that doesn’t go anywhere). Cochrane’s performance, for a while, confuses speaking in monotone with gruffness, but the actor and the character do warm up to the audience eventually. Abdi is really the film’s secret weapon, fully embracing a warm and compassionate character despite the fact that Bass has written him with a certain stereotype in mind (Aklilu comes from Ethiopia, so one can probably figure it out from there). Smart is also good here, as the mother who believes far more in her son than his father.
Not satisfied with the drama inherent in a father’s obvious love but reluctant acceptance of his son, Bass loads the scenario by giving us a ridiculously extended middle-act contrivance that goes for far, far too long: Tyson runs away, which leads Bobby and a group of park rangers into the forest, and if that weren’t enough, a snake, a heavy log, and a rainstorm are thrown in just to drive home the point that God or someone is making to the father who needs to lighten up (their savior magically appearing at the very minute when all hope seems lost, to rescue them from an area that took others hours to find, is the icing on the bitter cake). Tyson’s Run has no subtlety, but that isn’t the problem. It’s sadly without storytelling precision, too.
Photo courtesy of Iconic Events
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