What the Hell Happened to Helen Hunt?
http://lebeauleblog.com/2012/09/08/what-the-hell-happened-to-helen-hunt/10/
In 2000, Hunt returned to movies with a vengeance. She appeared in four movies that year. The first was the truly dreadful melodrama, Pay It Forward.share
Pay It Forward stars Haley Joel Osment as a saintly little boy who has the revolutionary idea that the world would be a better place if everyone did random acts of kindness. One of his acts is to try to set his single mom up with the teacher who inspired the “pay it forward scheme”. The teacher was played by Kevin Spacey.
Pay It Forward means to be a high-minded tear-jerker. But it’s the kind of movie that tries too hard to manipulate the audience’s emotions. Spoilers for the next sentence. It ends with Osment dying Christ-like for our sins. Instead of being moved, the audience just feels jerked around by such an obvious attempt to elicit an emotional response.
Reviews were not kind. Entertainment Weekly called the movie “reprehensible.” Pay It Forward bombed at the box office with a fourth place opening behind Meet the Parents which had already been in theaters for three weeks. The movie was clearly intended to be Oscar-bait, but no one was biting.