Heavy-handed and melodramatic, A Good Person stars Florence Pugh as happy fiancee Allison, a woman who's behind the wheel when her fiancé's sister and her husband are killed in a terrible crash. The sister happened to be the daughter of an alcoholic former policeman (Morgan Freeman) who’s left to care for Ryan (Celeste O'Connor), his teenage granddaughter. As contrivance would have it, Freeman’s Daniel, who's been sober for years, and Pugh’s Allison meet at an AA meeting when Allison decides it’s time to quit the opioids that numb her post-accident guilt and pain. Allison tries to bolt but Daniel encourages her to stay, and the two develop an unlikely, if sometimes strained, relationship. Chinaza Uche plays Daniel's son, the fiancé Allison dumped after the accident. He's estranged from his father. For added quirk and ham-handed metaphor-making, Daniel is a model train enthusiast whose hobby allows him to control the world he builds for his trains. Life, he recognizes, isn't so easily tamed. Writer/director Zach Braff 's overheated drama can't be saved by its cast or by sincere concerns about forgiveness, perhaps because the screenplay checks off an encumbering list of problems, including drug addiction, careless driving, alcoholism, child abuse, and teen sex. The result: A misfire of a movie that tries to stuff its two-hour and five-minute running time with more issues than you'd need to stock an eight-part series.
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