Max gets headaches.
Hey, everyone gets headaches, right? And as one of Max’s California coworkers jokes, insurance salesmen are particularly prone to them.
Some might point to a different source, too: She’s 15 years old and named Wally. Max has been raising her alone since she was a baby. And while Max loves his not-so-little girl, raising a spirited 15-year-old on your own isn’t easy. So yeah, maybe you can’t blame Dad for popping an Ibuprofen or two.
But while Wally can be a pain in the neck, the pain in Max’s head has a different source: a tumor on his spine.
Doctors say his options are slim. And grim. They could try to operate, but they’d give Max just a 20% chance of surviving the procedure. If he skips the surgery, he’ll live … for a year. Maybe.
And just like that, fatherhood takes on a new, horrific dimension.
Max can’t let them operate—not when Wally’s future is itself so in flux. He needs to prepare her for college, for love, for life. He needs to teach her how to drive, for cryin’ out loud.
But most especially, Max needs to introduce Wally to her own mother—Nicole, who left him and Wally for Dale, Max’s best friend. Max hasn’t talked to her in 15 years. And she never so much as sent Wally a birthday card.
But that doesn’t matter. Not now.
Max’s 20th college reunion is coming up in New Orleans. He knows Dale will be there: Maybe Nicole will, too. And what better way to spend some quality time with Wally than a long, cross-country road trip from California?
But Max can’t tell her he’s dying. Not yet. He’s not going to tell her they’re off to see her mother, either. Too much of a shock, Max reasons.
And while a pair of lies probably isn’t the best luggage for a cross-country trip, Max figures he’s got his hands full just getting Wally in the vehicle.
“We’re going,” he tells her.
“Fine,” Wally snaps. “As long as you’ve accepted the fact that I’ll be miserable for the entire time.”
So Max holds out his last big carrot: Come—with a good attitude—and he’ll teach her how to drive along the way.
And if Wally turns out to be a terrible driver—well, maybe he won’t have to worry about the tumor after all.
Wally is full of all the I-told-you-so wisdom and talk-to-the-hand attitude that many 15-year-old girls seem to be graced with. And Max can be just as cautious and glum as Wally thinks he is. But the two love each other. And that comes across, whether they’re laughing or screaming.
While Max tries to pass on what wisdom he can (a good man will take you dancing; never close your eyes when you drive), Wally passes on a bit of wisdom of her own, too—encouraging her father to take chances, grab new experiences and embrace the life he’s been given (even if she doesn’t know that the clock is ticking on that life). They begin to see the world through each other’s eyes—Wally’s world filled with excitement and possibility, Max’s hard-earned understanding of what growing up sometimes means.
We see, in a way, Wally grow up in the space of a few days—her immaturity slowly fading (albeit after many a mistake) as she shows signs of becoming a confident, vibrant young woman.
Don’t Make Me Go is really all about family, especially fatherhood. It reminds us of its challenges and showcases its joys. And Wally—despite many moments of frustration and exasperation—comes to understand just how much Max sacrificed for her.
We hear a reference to Jewish summer camp and the “pearly gates.” The film seems to acknowledge some sort of afterlife. We see someone in a meditative pose.
Max and Wally unexpectedly stumble onto a nudist beach—a scene that we see twice. (The movie, in fact, opens with the visit.) An older couple are seen walking generally toward the camera, he completely naked and she in just a bikini bottom. They (and we) see several other nude individuals, though most critical bits are out of the camera’s view.
Max and his girlfriend, Annie, have sex. We see, indistinctly, the side of her breast, and there’s some movement.
Wally’s relationship with her kinda-sorta boyfriend forms a pretty critical part of the plot. Wally mentions several times that they’re not even “official.” But Glenn still wants to have sex. He kisses her passionately at a party and brings her to an upstairs bedroom—stripping off both his and her shirts. (She’s still wearing bra-like undergarment.) He tries to undo her pants, too (we hear that he does a bit more when his hands are down there, as well) and tells her he has condoms, but Wally pushes him away and leaves the party soon thereafter.
Throughout the film, Glenn pressures Wally to get more physically intimate—asking for “pics” and (apparently) trying to trigger some competitive jealousy in Wally by seeing his ex-girlfriend (and telling her about it) while Wally’s on her cross-country trip. A friend of Wally’s also suggests that she should send Glenn some erotic pics of herself to keep him interested.
Wally never tells Max about any of this. But as Max gently describes the sort of man she’d like Wally to meet, date and eventually marry, Wally realizes that Glenn’s not it.
She finds herself attracted to another guy (Rusty) during the trip, too. She attends a party with him (sneaking out of her and Max’s hotel room to do so) and lies about her age. She’s told that Rusty lost his virginity in the field where the party’s being held. But when Wally leans over to kiss him, Rusty recoils—telling her he has a girlfriend already. The two spend the rest of the evening platonically … but still fall asleep. Max tracks them down in the morning and is, naturally, both suspicious and furious.
At a college reunion, we meet one of Max’s old best friends, who is gay. (He has brought his significant other to the reunion.) Wally wears some midriff-baring tops. Her friend squeezes her (covered) breasts together to augment her cleavage for a selfie. People make out passionately. We hear some really ribald jokes. A guy compliments a girl’s breasts. We hear several references to “booty calls.”
An adult man and woman decide to cohabitate. We hear about adults cheating on each other. We learn that Max was a musician, and that female fans used to take their tops off for him. We hear that Wally watched an episode of Friends when she was 6 and asked Max what sex was.
Max slugs a former friend and fights with him on the ground. We later see him holding ice to a bump on his head.
Wally’s driving lessons are rather stress-inducing for everyone involved: Wally, Max and anyone unlucky enough to be near their vehicle. She swerves into traffic unexpectedly, speeds at times and sometimes closes her eyes when she’s nervous. Their Wagoneer rear-ends another vehicle, causing some superficial damage and a visit from the police.
When she was 3, we hear that Wally slipped out of her dad’s arms and hit her head on something—causing a scar across one of her eyebrows.
[Spoiler Warning] We see the interior of an operating room and some rather bloody imagery therein. People pass out. There’s some talk of death. Someone dies during the course of the movie.
We hear four f-words and nearly 20 s-words. Also on the profanity docket: “a–,” “b–ch,” “d-ck” and “h—.” God’s name is misused at least 12 times, and Jesus’ name is abused four times.
An underage Wally drinks at a party, and she is (ahem) drafted into a chugging contest in which she’s turned upside down, and beer is pumped into her mouth via a keg. She doesn’t drink at another party, but many other underage peers do, and we see Glenn do an alcoholic shot. (She later refuses his sexual advances in part because he’s so drunk.)
Adult reunion attendees drink wine and champagne. Max and Wally go to a karaoke bar, where it appears a few patrons are inebriated. We hear about the poor decisions people tend to make when they’re under the influence. (We hear about some decisions that Max made under the influence that had devastating consequences.) Wally speculates about whether her mother is a “crackhead.”
Wally and Max do indeed love each other—but they lie to each other like crazy.
Wally goes to a party after telling Max that she’s sleeping over at a friend’s house. (Later, that earns her a three-week grounding; and had she not responsibly come home early, it would’ve been longer.) As mentioned, Wally sneaks out of her hotel room to go to another party (texting her father a lie, saying that she’s just gone for a walk) and then, at the party, lies about her age. (She claims she’s 18.)
Max’s lies are more lies of omission; things unsaid in an often-misguided attempt to protect his daughter. He frames the road trip as simply wanting to go to his college reunion, not to reunite Wally with her mother. Once he divulges one secret, Wally asks him, “Are you gonna hide more s— from me?”
“No,” Max says. But that, too, is a lie; Wally still knows nothing about his bone tumor.
Prime Video’s Don’t Make Me Go offers the movie viewer striking, and sometimes unpleasant, contrasts.
Often, the movie is deeply affecting. Stars John Cho (Max) and Mia Isaac (Wally) vividly and sometimes beautifully anchor this father-daughter story, showcasing a critical and uncomfortable time in a girl’s life. But—especially toward the end—it can swing toward melodrama: Heartstrings aren’t so much plucked as yanked.
The content can leave us equally mixed.
I really loved, again, the realistic interplay between Max and Wally. I also appreciated how responsible, in many ways, the movie is toward what a good father should be (under some pretty trying circumstances) as well as illustrating how many teens learn: through their own mistakes.
Wally’s terrible driving is a pretty effective metaphor to what being, and raising, a teen can feel like. You make bad decisions. You don’t really know how to start and stop. And as a parent sitting shotgun, the whole experience can be terrifying. And yet it’s through those errors that we grow. We learn. And we see Wally learn a lot—about herself, her father, life—along the way.
But Don’t Make Me Go requires its own viewers to strap their seatbelts tightly and, maybe, squeeze their own eyes shut at times, especially when the film goes off-road through some wholly unnecessary places.
The nudist beach was particularly mystifying to me. The language Wally uses in front of—and sometimes to—her dad, feels pretty false to the way many families (even secular families) operate.
It’d be too easy to make a play on the title here: Don’t Make Me Go? More like, Don’t Make Me Watch It! This movie has far too much good to offer for me to proffer such a shallow, one-blink take. That said, just as raising a teen can come with plenty of discomforting content (plenty!), so does this movie. And the movie doesn’t have nearly the beautiful payoff that raising a child does.
Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.
