I’ve taken on the task of painting houses in half a dozen states over the years, which is why I can say, with some authority, that viewing the amateurishly-paced, clumsily-titled “Fly Old Bird: Escape to the Ark” is “like watching paint dry.”
A “road trip” dramedy about old (not that old) men fleeing a Michigan trailer park for retirees for The Ark Encounter in fundamentalist Kentucky, just 45 miles from The Creation Museum, “Old Bird” is the cinematic version of “The Road to Nowhere,” a film of inane dialogue, dull characters and an undermotivated “quest” littered with nearly pointless stops along the way.
This Maki family faith-based project clocks in at a “Shawshank” length of nearly two and a half hours. But there’s little to nothing redeemable in it, a film where half the scenes have no reason to exist and the other half go on past any point they may have.
Alan Maki stars as Jon, an overwrought widower who doesn’t look nearly old enough to be bound for the nursing home, which his kids have sentenced him to. He’s forgetting things, having fender benders, weeping for his late wife and gritting his teeth that his kids — Heather Hamilton plays his daughter, director and son Shaun Maki plays his son — have put his long-immobile mobile home on the market.
Jon is fuming when he and neighbor Gibbs (Dennis McComas) “meet cute.” There’s little cute about their meeting, nothing in their banter to make us buy into an instant bond that will turn into a road trip of several hundred miles.
Jon is leery of “religious talk.” Gibbs is all about the Bible, which he’s read cover-to-cover “fourteen times.”
“You didn’t get it the first time?”
With his children and their power-of-attorney hold on his life closing in around him, Jon impulsively decides the two of them should hit the flee for a pilgrimage to “The Ark Encounter.” Sure, one’s a published author — “That’s GOTTA be a lie.” — wearing his pain like a hair shirt, the other just might be suffering in silence.
Because it’s hard to get in a word edgewise on the cagey Jon, who figures the best way to make their getaway is by swapping license plates they swipe from a stranger.
The not-remotely-random stops along the way (at a church, etc) add little to this quest. There’s nothing surprising about what happens to them, and nothing remotely interesting about their destination.
Acting here ranges from adequate to not even that.
If there’s a parable to all this, it’s in some Maki’s head and not in the finished film. If there’s any reason to make a recreated Noah’s Ark the destination other than tricking Indiana Jones fans, or fundamentalist-virtue-signaling your audience that this panders to their beliefs, I didn’t catch it.
I was too busy missing all the drying paint that at least gives one the satisfaction that you’ve accomplished something, which is more than you can say for watching this “Escape to the Ark.”
Rating: unrated, PG worthy
Cast: Alan Maki, Dennis McComas, Mikah Scott Carter and Shaun Maki.
Credits: Directed by Shaun Maki, scripted by Alan Maki. A Sun and Paw Films release on Amazon Prime.
Running time: 2:25
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