Parents' Guide to Abandoned Man

Abandoned Man seems to have its heart in the right place, but the story is messy, alternately meandering, slow, and cliched. Little Lidya is the totally unbelievable dream child played with cloying sweetness and forced to utter things no child her age would ever say. The plot wanders to random montages of Lidya and her uncle bonding over magic tricks and walks in the park. We have seen all of this many times before. Much is made of an old Ford Mustang that no one can fix until car genius Baran gives it a go. He fixes it! A hard-bitten boss does no favors for anyone. Then suddenly he is a big sweetie. What a surprise! During Baran's night shift cleaning toilets, he is beaten, seemingly for no reason. How does this move the plot along in any helpful way?

The storytelling feels amateurish. Esat and Baran stand outside a building and Esat tells Baran, "You renovated this place in a month." Surely Baran already knows what he did, but the audience doesn't and the filmmakers choose the weakest possible way to tell us. Equally ineffective, the action whirls around aimlessly in quick cuts, from memories of a prison beating to a conversation about Lidya becoming a foster child to speeding recklessly in a heaving sportscar, as if the aggregate of these snippets will have some emotional punch. But it doesn't. It just feels sentimental and derivative, as if the director saw this ploy work in some other film and thought she'd give it a shot in hers.