Tyson’s Run Parent Guide

Tyson (Major Dodson) has an autism spectrum disorder and struggles in social situations so he has been homeschooled by his mother (Amy Smart). Now that Tyson is moving on to high school curriculum, though, his mother is unable to teach him advanced math. His father (Rory Cochrane), who coaches football at the local high school, is opposed to Tyson coming to his school, partly out of concern for his son, partly out of embarrassmen. But Tyson needs to learn algebra, and he must navigate the new and sometimes frightening social landscape in which he finds himself. Luckily for Tyson, he meets Aklilu (Barkhad Abdi), a former marathon runner who encourages his newfound interest in running. The city marathon is coming up, and Tyson would love to compete – but he’s going to have to get his father’s approval, one way or another.

I’m not sure if the screenwriter for this movie has ever met other people. Apart from Tyson’s dialogue, which is deliberately unusual, every single person in this movie stumbles through dialogue that would make machine code sound like Shakespeare. It’s not like the actors are trying, either. Every take feels like the first take, if not the actors’ first look at the script. It’s brutally hard to watch, especially since Tyson has a tendency to repeat long, choppy sentences in their entirety, sometimes several times. The only thing worse than hearing wooden dialogue once is hearing it over and over and over again.

Not only is the script equal parts treacle and sawdust, it is transparently unoriginal. Every beat of this story is a shameless rehash of every other “inspirational” sports movie with no new content or context. The characters shamble between achingly familiar plot points still steaming from the cinematic microwave from which they were just pulled, pushing the film to its unlikely, yet inevitable, and unsatisfying conclusion.

Suffering under the incalculable weight of one of the worst scripts I’ve ever heard, Tyson’s Run barely stumbles over its own finish line. While there is functionally no objectionable content for parents to be concerned with, your average viewer would have more fun giving themselves paper cuts and bathing in vinegar. That, at least, wouldn’t consume 103 minutes of their lives.