Main cast: Elijah Wood (Norval Greenwood), Martin Donovan (Brian), Stephen McHattie (Gordon), Michael Smiley (Jethro), Garfield Wilson (Ronald Plum), Simon Chin (Dandy), Madeleine Sami (Gladys), and Ona Grauer (Precious)
Director: Ant Timpson
No, Elijah Wood didn’t star in a pornographic film, in case you are wondering. Come to Daddy is to be taken literally – his character Norval Greenwood receives a letter from his estranged father, asking for an opportunity for a reunion in order for Brian to make amends to Norval after all these years of absence, so off Norval goes to this remote seaside house. Only, nothing is what it appears to be, and poor Norval soon finds out that his father has kept some bad company in the past, and that past has caught up with Brian.
Norval is basically a taller Frodo Baggins who never had enough hugs as a child: he’s pretty awkward throughout the movie, no doubt because he’s not sure how to approach a father he’d longed all this while to be reunited with, a man who is now practically a stranger. He wants almost desperately to know why Brian writes to him all this while, because he clearly wants to hear that his father still loves him and has always wanted them to be together again. Unfortunately for him, Brian had been a pretty bad boy after he had abandoned Norval and his mother, and now Frodo has to fend off some vicious, hardened criminals in order to save the father he barely knows.
This movie takes quite a long time to get going, and for a while, it’s just some guys taking the opportunity to show off how well they can act all kooky and crazy on the screen. Once the violence starts, though, the dark humor ramps up a bit as does the amount of injuries sustained on everyone’s part.
This one does many things right. The cast is fine, the violence is fine once it gets going, the dark humor is fine. All in all, the whole thing is unobjectionable… and that’s my issue with this movie. It tries to do many things – a father-son drama, a home invasion thriller, a dark crime comedy – but doesn’t seem to succeed in going all the way in any of these directions. Just when I am starting to feel that the movie has settled into a comfortable tempo, it uproots itself to move to another beat. I end up feeling like I’ve been taken along for a pretty nice journey, only I never really get to fully enjoy the scenery along the way due to always having to keep moving.
In the end, I can say that I like Come to Daddy, and I won’t be lying. Still, I also wish that it’d had a little bit more father-son drama, a little bit more violence, a little bit more humor… this one tries very hard to be a jack of all trades, in other words, when it may be better off focusing on one or two areas instead.
