Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.

The Travis family has to deal with the popular athletic older son Matt's suicide. Tim (Emile Hirsch) is trying to live with everybody's sympathies. Mother Sandy (Sigourney Weaver) starts smoking marijuana. Father Ben (Jeff Daniels) abandons work and spends his days in the park. Sister Penny (Michelle Williams) returns home from college on occasions.I like Tim and Sandy's journey in dealing with the lost in the first half. It would be a fine quiet small indie if that's the movie. However writer/director Dan Harris wants this movie to be about secrets. He holds all of it back until the second half. It leaves the first half with an emptiness like the movie is refusing to let the audience into the story. Once the reveals start happening, it diminishes the power of the lost somehow. It tries to give it meaning and loses its value.

This film is a great example of a storyteller who doesn't understand the story that he's telling. I know that sounds like an absurd thing to allege. How can the guy telling the tale not understand it? However, it's the only way I can explain the bizarrely wrong emotional focus and characterizations on display in Imaginary Heroes. Writer/director Dan Harris is like a cook who set out to make an apple pie, yet tried to make it with kumquats and licorice. You might be able to make something oddly tasty out of those ingredients, but not by following an apple pie recipe. This movie has the structure and style of a by-the-numbers tale of 21st century suburban angst stuck in between a beginning which unknowingly negates its own premise and an ending with an escalating series of ridiculous revelations that even Harris can't keep up with. Things start out with 17 year old Tim Travis (Emile Hirsch) telling us that his older brother Matt (Kip Pardue) killed himself because he was incredibly great at swimming at the same time he hated swimming more than anything else in the world. Now, I have to confess, this opening with Tim's narration of images of Matt put me off this film right away, long before any of the other flaws reared their head. I can imagine someone hating the obsessive demands of competitive sports or the pressure of competition. How the hell does anyone hate the act of swimming enough to commit suicide? If you really disliked it that much, you'd stop swimming when you were too young for anyone to know you were any good at it. To say that Matt killed himself because he hated swimming is a ludicrously simplistic description of a much more complex dynamic, and if the point of Tim describing it like that would have been to illustrate how ludicrously simplistic Tim's thinking or view of the world is…that might have been interesting. Unfortunately, every example of human behavior in this movie is as ludicrously simplistic as Tim's analysis of his brother offing himself.Even if I'm overreacting to that, the rest of Imaginary Heroes still isn't any good. It starts off with suicide and then focuses on the characters least affected by that tragedy. Tim and his mom, Sandy (Sigourney Weaver), go about with their unimaginatively angsty suburban lives and there's no meaningful connection between anything they do and what happened to Matt. The only one who is affected by it is Tim's dad, Ben (Jeff Daniels), and he's a terribly written character who only exists to serve the Almighty Plot Hammer. Ben switches from resentful bastard to fumbling, desperate, nice guy to wounded father to suit whatever particular scene Tim and Sandy are in at the moment. In this script, Tim and Sandy are meant to be actual human beings while Ben is never considered as more than a prop.At least Ben gets a decent amount of screen time servicing Tim and Sandy's narratives. Tim also has an older sister, Penny (Michelle Williams), and I haven't the foggiest idea what this character is doing in this movie at all. Her existence has no purpose or function and she contributes nothing to the story. She's dead weight that should have been cut out of the screenplay very early on in the process and is another glaring example of how filmmakers occasionally need someone to tell them "no". Penny isn't nearly as glaring a necessary deletion as Jar Jar Binks, but I'd say she's about a .4 on the Binks scale.There isn't much of a plot to Imaginary Heroes. Stuff just happens. Most of it's boring and I could go on and on about how what isn't boring doesn't make any sense. I just want to focus on one big, whanging crazy thing. This is going to spoil a significant aspect of the film, so if you haven't seen it and ever plan to…stop reading now.Okay, here it comes. After having some sort of drug addled sex with his best friend Kyle (Ryan Donowho), Tim eventually discovers that Ben, the father who's never liked him and treated him like crap his whole life, isn't his biological father. It turns out Sandy had an affair with Kyle's dad and that's how she got pregnant with Tim. Now, which of these do you think would be more traumatic?1. Finding out the son of a bitch who's made your life miserable isn't your real father?2. Finding out you just boinked your half-brother?Maybe I'm old fashioned, but I think the whole "you screwed your half-brother" situation would be a much, much bigger deal. Once the secret of Tim's parentage is revealed, though, no one and nothing in the movie ever references or even alludes to the whole "sex with your half-brother" thing. There's a very big fuss made of Ben not being Tim's real dad, but Tim shtupping a blood relative gets flushed down the memory hole and is never seen or heard from again. Am I wrong about this? Is finding out that you essentially were the product of a sperm donor more disturbing than being told you've ignorantly committed incest?I don't know what else I can tell you about Imaginary Heroes. The parts of this film that aren't boring are wildly and weirdly ill considered. Unless you like kumquats and licorice with a nice, flaky crust…don't bother with this movie.

This movie is genius! just pure genius. the plot, the characters, the imagery, the play of emotions... a script like this could have ended up being so corny, but no, not this; and i don't think that anyone can watch this movie and remain untouched. i don't think any other movie has really dealt with the complexities of a modern day family and youth like this one has.The music is something else in this movie - be it the theme music or the soundtrack - each scene is beautifully landscaped with the right choice of music. especially one particular scene - which may shock a few people initially (OH PREJUDICES!!!) but will undoubtedly create a spark no matter how tiny in anyone's heart.MUST SEE THIS MOVIE!

Given my summary above, I have to remark just briefly (the cynic in me being brought out by this and similar films) it's bound to be a sure-fire hit with the 'all films should be a slice of the worst part of life' crew, of which there seem to be many in the under 30 crowd. Is the film about the suicide of the youth? the mother's way of dealing with this tragedy? the father's? the brother's? One of these isn't enough for this clichéd and unoriginal script. It has to tackle everybody's reaction at once, leaving the viewer wondering if any one reaction is really genuine.As a study of American family life it fails to come to terms with its own ambiguity.Sorry, thumbs down.