A ChucksConnection Film Review

 

Scott Callenberger wears optical white low top Converse “Chuck Taylor” All Stars in the film.

An Angry Boy

 

by Hal Peterson

Owen works on a drawing during a break from his job at the high school.

 

An Angry Boy is a film that is part horror and crime drama but also a psychological study about Owen Marshal (Scott Callenberger), a teenager who was kidnapped at age seven, but fortunate enough to escape and be rescued after a couple of months captivity. We gradually learn about this through a series of brief flashbacks that are interspersed throughout the film. At the time, Owen had a different identity as Cameron Desanty (Graham Davidson). After his escape Cameron suffered from post traumatic amnesia, and didn’t remember anything about his ordeal. He and his mother Kathy (Laura Frenzer) were placed in the witness protection program, and sent to start a new life in Queens, New York which is where we first meet him. Now Owen is an upper division student and leading an active life at John Adams high school. He and his best friend Ricky Anderson (Caleb Lowery) have janitorial jobs there for the summer. Ricky and his meter maid mom Jenna (Mia Y. Anderson) make up a tight knit family of two single moms and their teenaged sons.

 

Owen’s mom lets him and Ricky into their locked apartment.

The film action gets underway with another unrelated crime. A television news anchor goes to an ATM in a sketchy part of town late at night and is accosted by two men who want to steal her money. Luckily she is helped by Owen who sees what is happening and knocks out the two men. He quickly runs away after his good deed, as he obviously doesn’t want recognition. However she has video which she posts on line to thank him. The video goes viral, but as no good deed seemingly goes unpunished, it has the unintended effect of outing Owen’s identity. Mark Doucette (Thomas Cambridge), Cameron/Owen’s kidnapper sees the video and recognizes Owen as the boy he knew as Cameron. He is able to track down Owen and his mom to their home in Queens and comes there to get his revenge. In a very brutal scene he takes Kathy and Owen hostage and murders Kathy with a sledge hammer after torturing them at gunpoint.  Luckily Owen is saved from a similar fate when Ricky arrives with a baseball bat and chases Mark off.       

 

Ricky and Owen vaping on the front steps.

 

Owen’s life is in turmoil again, and not just from the shock of seeing his mother murdered. He is starting to see flashbacks of his kidnapping and time with Mark and Andy (Eric Roberts), the other man responsible for Cameron’s captivity. While the police want to pursue Kathy’s murderer, the only leads they have come through Owen and what little Ricky was able to see of Mark’s car license plate during his escape from Queens. In a tense meeting with Dr. Eric Fischer (Jason Simon), it is revealed that he was the same doctor who interviewed Cameron after his rescue. Owen had no recollection of those meetings due to his post traumatic amnesia. Dr. Fischer tells Owen that only he can break through the wall put up by his brain. Dr. Fischer encourages Owen to check himself into the doctor’s clinic in New England where he thinks that they could make a break through in discovering the man who kidnapped Owen and attacked his family. But Owen decides that a direct approach is the better way to go, and although he tells Jenna (now his guardian) that he is going to the clinic, his real plan is to take all the possible leads that he has written down in a notebook, and go directly to a region of the state where there have been a lot of missing children. There he plans to put up posters and systematically track down the predator (Mark) responsible for ruining his life to get revenge. This quest makes up the balance of the plot.          

 

Owen begins researching every possible lead to find the predators.

 

An Angry Boy is a film that makes you think about things long after you have viewed it because the subject matter is very compelling, even as it is only alluded to during the film in short bursts of dialogue by Mark and Andy. They have in mind a perfect world of boys and men living together as a family, but held together by the systematic abuse and brainwashing of their young captives, telling them that they must do what they are told or face death. This is the harsh reality faced by Cameron and the other boy captives over the years that sits behind the story line. The main plot of Owen’s search for Mark does have a lot of flaws in it, especially regarding the involvement of the police, events after Ricky loses all contact with him, the impact of injuries on the main characters, the ending of the film, and the introduction of a woman (Lauren McCann) who helps out Mark by kidnapping Owen when he becomes aware that Owen is on the brink of discovering his identity. Overriding all things is the premise that Owen becomes a modern day knight, seeking those who would kidnap and abuse young boys, starting out by searching for the person who has wronged him and his family, so he may wreck vengeance on the man who has treated him so mercilessly. And Owen is very much made to suffer in some brutal scenes. An interesting and provocative film by Andrew Fitzgerald with strong performances by Scott Callenberger and Thomas Cambridge. 

Best Chucks Scene

 

An ominous drip of blood falls on Owen's left chuck.

 

Scott Callenberger (Owen) wears optical white low top chucks throughout the film. He starts out with a pristine new pair, but all the action quickly breaks them in. The camera work is chucks friendly with a number of closeups throughout. Two subtle but ominous looking shots frame the peril that Owen finds himself in at times. One is when Owen is seated on the Spanish donkey device, and a drip of blood fall on his left sneaker. The other is a closeup showing his right foot restrained with an ankle cuff, the way that Mark likes to keep his boys captive.

 

The boys were often restrained with ankle cuffs.

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