MAGA Martyr Zachary Levi’s Long-Delayed Christian Film Is a Mess

It often feels like Hollywood has only just started to wake up to the importance of authentic autism representation. For decades, autistic characters have been written by neurotypical people and played by neurotypical actors. If they managed to not be treated as aggressive, unfeeling caricatures who need to be fixed, odds are they were reduced to saintly, one-dimensional “inspiration porn” fodder. Were these autistic characters at least centered in their own stories? Rarely.

In recent years, shows like Netflix’s Heartbreak High and Freeform’s Everything’s Going To Be Okay have begun to move the needle, featuring autistic characters actually brought to life by autistic creatives. But we still have a long way to go, as The Unbreakable Boy makes abundantly clear.

Jon Gunn’s latest film is based on Scott LeRette’s 2017 memoir of the same name, which chronicles life with his autistic son Austin (played by Jacob Laval) and his own embrace of Christianity. Naturally, the adaptation is produced by Kingdom Story Company, the same Christian production company behind Walmart DVD-bin finds like Ordinary Angels and Jesus Revolution. Then there’s the fact that Unbreakable Boy star Zachary Levi has emerged as an outspoken, perhaps anti-vaxx MAGA groupie since the movie was filmed way back in 2020.

Ultimately, it’s irrelevant whether Levi’s controversial celebrity had anything to do with the film getting canned for five years. Kingdom Story is fond of Trojan-hosing the religious conservatism of their movies into the third act in hopes of making them more appealing to the masses. But with Levi and The Unbreakable Boy’s mawkish take on raising an autistic child thrown into the mix, the whole endeavor winds up feeling noxious underneath its saccharine, poorly lit exterior.

The Unbreakable Boy opens in media res, as family patriarch Scott (Levi) packs his two sons into the car after a New Year’s Eve party, clearly drunk as a skunk. Austin, whose chipper narration crowds nearly every scene, ominously tells us that “this is the night when everything broke.”

The film might as well throw in a record scratch, because without further ado, it flashes back 14 years to tell us exactly how Scott finds himself in this situation. At the time, he’s an easygoing man-child who spends most of his days hanging out with his imaginary friend Joe (Drew Powell) and daydreaming about making it big as a Manhattan ad executive. He negs cute shopgirl Teresa (Meghann Fahy) into going on three dates, not thinking much more of their flirtation. But this is a Christian movie, so it takes place in a universe where contraceptive measures and abortion seemingly don’t exist.

When Teresa calls Scott out of the blue to say she’s pregnant, there’s no conversation about what to do beyond Scott’s father congratulating him for “facing consequences” like a man. Teresa, whose last name he didn’t even know until they were having a child together, only mentions months later that she’s been divorced twice. Oh, and she has a rare genetic disorder that causes bones to break easily. She passes the condition onto Austin, a fact that The Unbreakable Boy’s marketing almost never touched on even though it explains the film’s title. The poor kid breaks two ribs during birth, which doctors somehow don’t catch for over a year. (Get a new pediatrician, already!)

Like LeRette’s book, the film largely jumps from vignette to vignette. Levi brings a ghost of the childlike enthusiasm that won him the title role in Shazam to Scott’s conversations with his imaginary best bud. Meanwhile, the steeliness behind Fahy’s sunny exterior that has made her such a breakout on shows like The White Lotus and The Perfect Couple manages to poke through in quieter scenes, when she’s not relegated to the beleaguered wife role. Yet for all of Austin and Joe’s attempts to explain how we should be feeling at every turn, viewers are often held at arms’ length from the family’s everyday struggles.

Ironically, it’s Austin who suffers the most from The Unbreakable Boy’s harried editing. Too often, his interiority is short-changed in favor of scenes in which awe-struck professionals gush to his parents about how his bright-eyed outlook has transformed their days—even as Scott and Teresa struggle to make ends meet, and Scott’s alcoholism worsens.

Obviously, there’s value in centering neurodivergent people’s perspectives. But for much of The Unbreakable Boy’s runtime, Austin is reduced to an almost-magical plot device for the people in his life, even if they can’t see it. That makes a sequence in which an overstimulated Austin throws a mug at his mother’s head and chokes his brother all the more jarring.

Such episodes aren’t uncommon for some people on the autism spectrum, so it’s odd when Austin is forcibly checked into a hospital for psychiatric evaluation and subsequently released a few scenes later, his reaction hastily explained by imbalanced medication. Most of the movie leans on the inspiration-porn stereotype, making this swerve into another caricature feel scattershot at best.

Unlike, say, God’s Not Dead, Scott’s brushes with faith don’t frontload The Unbreakable Boy. He only really buys into J.C. after his drunken New Year’s leads him to an A.A. meeting at Meghan’s church. Twilight alum Peter Facinelli (who initially brought LeRette’s book to Gunn) pops up as a laid-back man of God who, of course, gets through to him when his fed-up wife can’t. Facinelli may have hot-vampire-dad cred with millennials, but I’d wager that he’s always been more into the Mormon overtones of Stephanie Meyer’s paranormal romance than we thought.

Plenty of moviegoers might find The Unbreakable Boy to be a fine, if formulaic, family tale about a dad embracing his son’s differences. Lionsgate is clearly hoping so, emphasizing on the film’s poster that it does, in fact, technically hail from the same studio that brought you 2017’s Wonder.

Yet it’s hard to shake the knowledge that Levi and so many right-wingers this movie is aimed at adamantly support a presidential administration that’s trying its best to make kids like Austin and his families’ lives infinitely harder on a federal level. Especially at a moment like this, The Unbreakable Boy would’ve been better off left on Lionsgate’s servers.