The Boys Excelled
It's easy in a movie like The Boys are Back for the writer, director or actors to go overboard with sentimentality, wringing too much emotion from the audience. Thankfully they resisted that urge. What we really liked about the movie is that the emotions displayed by the family seemed exactly right. Who doesn't like Clive Owen? But we particularly liked the performance by the mother-in-law, the grandmother who lost her daughter. She could have been shown as a villain trying to replace her daughter as the parent, but she was so believable and likable as a grandmother trying to support her son-in-law in their mutual loss and protecting the children in trying circumstances. The screenplay was so poignant that when the movie was over, my wife, who is a cancer survivor, and I thought how lucky we are to have never divorced or encountered the issues faced by children of broken marriages.
This is a movie with a feel good ending, beautiful cinematography, great vistas of Australia.