102 min.
Release Date: July 7, 2020 (Digital); July 21, 2020 (On-Demand)
There is warm and touching, and then there is saccharine and manipulative. For a crowd-pleaser about possible reincarnation, “Mighty Oak” keeps wavering back and forth but mostly gets it right. Specializing in feel-good cinema where the outcome of the stories he’s telling is always positive (except for maybe 2007’s mind-meltingly insipid “Bratz”), director Sean McNamara (2011’s “Soul Surfer”), working from a script by screenwriter Matt R. Allen (2016’s “Nine Lives”), hinges on one taking a leap of faith and fully surrendering to the story's fundamental beliefs. While its mix of spiritual earnestness and rock-band edginess ultimately turns to mush, the film is always pure of intention. An audience’s enjoyment of “Mighty Oak” will be directly proportional to their threshold for corn.
Gina “Jean Jacket” Jackson (Janel Parrish) manages her brother, Vaughn (Levi Dylan, grandson of Bob Dylan), the frontman for Ocean Beach, Southern California-based band Army of Love. On the night after a show, the band gets into a car accident, and Vaughn is the only one to not make it. Ten years after his death, Gina is stuck, drinking hard and battling a gambling addiction, until former guitarist Pedro (Carlos PenaVega) tries getting Gina back together with the band, including members Alex (Nana Ghana) and Darby (Ben Milliken). Meanwhile, 10-year-old boy Oak Scoggins (Tommy Ragen), who lives with his Navy vet mother Valerie (Alexa PenaVega) above the cafe where Army of Love would always practice, is given the late Vaughn’s $3,000 guitar to practice on by the coffee shop owner and learns every lick of every Army of Love song. When Gina notices that the musically prodigious Oak can actually play and play well—and he doodles similar monkey cartoons, just like Vaughn—she thinks Oak might be the reincarnated soul of her brother.
“Mighty Oak” isn't above having flaws, but it is likable and often charming in a cornball sort of way. Director Sean McNamara doesn't always pull off the jarring tonal shifts when having to corral so many characters, particularly Oak’s ill-equipped, opioid-addicted mother who, of course, finds herself in a heap of trouble on the night of her son’s first show. The film also builds to a walloping revelation that is so clunkily unveiled in a cemetery in the rain during a funeral; the news is then followed up by A Great Big World's “Say Something”—a powerful song in its own right—that might as well stand in for “Songs to Make You Cry” because it’s clearly telling the viewer how to feel. Finally, a big emoting scene is not convincingly sold by newcomer Tommy Ragen when Oak must turn on the waterworks, and two stilted performances from two of the most hilariously insensitive (and then hilariously gullible) grandparents make some key emotional beats fall flat. When “Mighty Oak” isn’t pushing one’s cynicism buttons with its melodramatic moments, it's sweet and sincere enough as well-meaning entertainment.
Grade: C +
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