Review of The Hero (2017) by Random D — 16 Dec 2017

This is a story about a 71 year old actor having sex with a 35+ year old comedian. I would like to say that there's more to it than that, but really, there isn't. Sam Elliott's character Lee Hayden (aka 'The Hero') doesn't really overcome, or accomplish, anything during this 93 minute movie.

I love Krysten Ritter and I think she does a great job playing the character of Lucy. It's nice to see her playing something other than bitchy or snarky. But the only reason her character exists is so that she can turn down Lee's invitation to the lifetime award ceremony. It's the catalyst for him to then ask out Laura Prepon's character Charlotte for their first date. Every interaction with Lucy thereafter is basically just dialog to pass the time between the scenes with Charlotte. Well, to be fair, there was a moment of reconciliation between Lee and Lucy towards the end of the movie, but she apparently wasn't invited to his birthday a few scenes later. That would've been the perfect transitional moment for Lee, to show him passing into a new phase of his life. But sadly no. It never happened.

Also, in the first act Lee tells multiple people that he was going to be working on a new movie after he had a hallucination, leading the audience to believe that he was in the process of creating something special and overcoming setbacks in his career. But this too went nowhere and was quickly forgotten.

I know there must be some deep meaning to the drug induced hallucinations Lee experiences, but what a cowboy doing taxes while staring at the ocean has to do with anything is beyond my ability to discern. There seems to be no real point to them.

There was a lot of good emotional dialog in this movie, but sadly there was no point to it. There was no transitional moment for 'The Hero'. Only the beginnings of a reconciliation with Lucy, that apparently didn't last very long. The best that can be said is that his character now has a girlfriend, but other than that nothing changed from the beginning of the movie. In fact, the final scene is exactly the same as the beginning scene. Nothing that happened in between changed anything.