The tagline on the poster for writer-director Zach Braff’s contrived, heavy-handed and tragedy-soaked drama “A Good Person” reads, “Sometimes we find hope where we least expect it.” Well, that’s true, but it’s kind of a fortune-cookie, greeting-card philosophy — and while we can’t fault the filmmaker for the marketing, that slogan is indicative of the well-meaning but ultimately hollow nature of the work itself.
We know we’re in for some Major Life Lessons from the moment Morgan Freeman’s Daniel tinkers with his elaborate, years-in-the-making model railway setup and talks in voice-over about how you can control the miniature figures and the imagined lives in this basement universe, unlike the messy and painful realities of actual life, where things rarely turn out the way things want to be.
