As a rule, I tend to watch bad movies to their end. At least, I will have something to hone my artistic hate.

My persistence harkens back to a rebellion against my mother who would walk out of a movie at the utterance of a curse word, at the revealing of the “sinful flesh” or at gross violence. She’s not overly puritanical; she just marshals her time for things that are beneficial. She prefers Cowboy movies and Opera. If Gene Autry sang “O Fortuna,” I am pretty sure she would have found the perfect entertainment experience. She walked out of Jerry McGuire and she had a hard time enduring the orgasm scene in “Harry met Sally.” She has particular, old world tastes and she will not squander her time.

I abjectly refuse to be offended by content. From the horrific to the most insipidly saccharine, I will endure any movie. Granted, very few make it past prescreening. I watch a movie via one of three avenues: it has been added to my Netflix queue in some moment of insanity, Rotten Tomatoes gives it a high rating or Kenneth Turan likes it. If it makes the long voyage into my player, then I will sit down, buck up and throw popcorn at the screen if the abject stupidity gets too much.

Enter “Reservation Road” – a collaborative crapshooting between John Burhnam Schwartz and Terry George. I am going to ruin the plot for you because I am saving you. Consider it a preemptive cauterization. Enter two families – the good family and the bad family. The good family, the Learners (FOR FUCK SAKE, I think they will be “learning” something about themselves) has a cohesive core – a loving wife, a dutiful dad and two beautiful kids who are musically talented. Returning from a concert where the son play cello at a beachside concert, they drive slowly, cautiously and banter about the fireflies captured by the daughter. The adorable little girl wants to keep the fireflies, but her mother (Jennifer Connelly) insists they will die unless she sets them free. She displays a crucial moment of irritation where she does not want to deal with her daughter’s childishness and solves the issue by having them set them free. This is important. This becomes the crux of the mother’s moral quandary delivered at the negligent hands of the bad family.

Bad Dad (Mark Ruffalo who might be the most boring actor in existence) is a divorcee shitbag who lies worse than his player acts. Bad Dad opens with trying to be a Good Dad by taking his Bad Son to a baseball game. The game runs into extra innings, the ex-wife/worried other burns his ear off with her cellphone conversation and he is quite distressed as he rushes to get Bad Son home.

In a rush, Bad Dad speeds home on the dark roads as the good family stops at the gas station. The Good Son decides to let the fireflies out. He walks to the edge of the road. Bad Dad comes speeding along while he gets by his ex-wife on his cell phone. In his building distress and distraction, he drifts across the line, veers to avoid an oncoming car and clips the Good Son with his grill guard.

At this crucial and still entirely watchable moment, Bad Dad does two things. He flees the scene. Of course, the Bad Son was asleep, had taken his seat belt off and ends up smashing his face of the dashboard. As Bad Dad drives off, he begins to lie and his lies grow steadily worse as the movie progresses. Of course, he also does a good thing. He reduces Sean Curley (the Good Son who got killed) to a bit part that doesn’t have to act in the rest of the rapidly degrading car crash of a movie.

As the story unfolds, it hinges heavily on coincidence as it tries to mesh these two separate lives into emotional cohesion. Bad Dad’s ex-wife is the music teacher at the school where the good kids go (those small Connecticut towns, you know). Bad Dad learns that he actually killed the kid over the radio and cruises the funeral. There, he sees his ex-wife who played the piano at the funeral. Coincidence #1. Fine, that’s cool. Their lives are interconnected in the great existential web of the universe. Huzzah.

The story continues to unfold with the picking up of the pieces. The good family is coping, grieving and crying. It would be touching if the actor’s deliveries weren’t so non-compelling. I felt worse when the toddler got clipped at the end of Pet Cemetery. I released in that moment that Jennifer Connelly can’t actually act unless she’s doped up on heroine and lubed up. Joaquin Phoenix does a passable job, but the scenes they cast him in are mundane and not the good mundane that reminds us these actors are playing real people who need to go to work and flip through pictures of vehicles to find the dark SUV that killed their son.

Bad Dad turns out to be a lawyer. He makes a real cockup of his life as he tries to hide his crime and go about his life like nothing has happened. He hides the murder vehicle in his garage, lies a lot and does a poor job hiding his distress (or conveying it for that matter). Good Dad starts to do some research, while good Mom begins to develop a deeper friendship with the piano teacher ex-wife. Good Dad finds out how hard it is to convict driveoffs. He decides he needs a lawyer…

This was where I started daring my television set. I am a grown man. I should not be pointing at my Toshiba and shouting, “Don’t you dare. Don’t you fucking dare.” To be fair, I was yelling at the director and the writer who thought this obvious, freshman year film school plot twist would be a good follow up to Cheadle’s performance in George’s “Hotel Rwanda.”

Oh, and they dared. Good Dad gets a lawyer. Good Dad meets Bad Dad. Bad Dad recognizes both the dossier and Good Dad because he had been scoping the funeral. This is where I turn purple. I am cursing at my TV. I am hopping up and down on my sofa. I realize I am less than 45 minutes into the movie and I decide I will not waste my evening and my brain power on this tripe. I eject the disk, stuff it into the Netflix mailer like it was a biohazard bag and cursed the day writer’s ever discovered the uncanny, the serendipitous and whatever weak mental crutches writer’s use to shunt the heavy lifting onto raw coincidence.

I did not watch the rest of the movie. I will never watch the rest of the movie unless I am drunk and it’s on late night TV and I have a case of insomnia caused by a three day bender of indie films. I do not care if the rest of the movie began to sparkle and shine. (Rotten Tomatoes gave it a 36% so I doubt I missed anything world-changing.) The film maker’s assumed the audience who were slack-jawed idiot who could be charmed by plot parlor tricks. I may be a slack-jawed idiot, but I can spot bad writing and hackneyed deliver like it was my own fiction.

My mom has the right idea. Don’t watch things that will offend you. For her, it’s cussin’ and bare ankles. Sadly, I actually have to watch the movie in order to discover the odious assaults on my delicate artistic sensibilities. Fuck you, Terry George, give me my 45 minutes back!