Palmer (2021) - What Gets Me Instead!

 

★★★☆☆

'Palmer' is easily a must-see if you like emotional stories of troubled souls seeking to straighten things out. There're dramatic elements to either warm or break your heart, depending on what you've been through, and how you associate it with experiences of your own. It's basically not a bleak dark story though Justin Timberlake's short-tempered Palmer does seem to bear a lot of hardship growing up as he considers himself an abandoned kid, like the boy next door named Sam he later has to cope with.

Like any other films made to encourage and inspire, the formula for 'Palmer' is apt to be more or less the same, where troubled souls usually with a problematic background, going through phases of understanding, are then saved by some other necessarily or not troubled companions, and finally come to realize some truths that manage to get them peace and help them pull through. Such stories are hard to fail unless the director and the cast are a total disaster! Thanks to Timberlake's convincing performance here, and a promising formula like that, 'Palmer' is decent enough to be able to get your attention all the way even if it feels like too ideal and satisfying to be true in the end. I don't consider myself a pessimistic person but I don't buy a story in which everything does turn out all right in the end like it's promised either, because in life, it usually does not!

'Palmer' is mainly the story between Palmer and Sam, but what seems to get me the most is not how the two have changed and saved each other's lives by the end. It's, instead, Sam's mother Shelly's finally struggle to decide what is the best thing to be done for her son! Shelly, as a drug addict and real messed up mother, her last approach to her son almost makes me want to cry with her as I genuinely understand how hurtful and devastating it is to have to go away while all she wants is stay!