Always Smile

It’s all peach and no pits in the terrific Atlanta homeless thriller Always Smile, written and directed by Jason Park. It opens with a screen filled with a red race car tearing down the street, which is a great way to announce that boredom is not allowed. Mya (Sera Richards) needs to get somewhere, but the bus is late, leaving her vaping by the side of the road. A white car pulls up and a man in a tiger mask grabs May from the bus stop and drives off with her.

Meanwhile, Alex (Jason Park) is wrapping up a morning run and is heading back to the van he lives in to wake his sleeping brother, Johnny (Min Keon Kim). They use bottled water to brush their teeth and wet-nap towelettes to clean themselves. Before Alex drops Johnny off at community college while he goes to work his construction job, he slips Johnny a big bill to take out his classmate Julie (Chasidy Humphrey). Johnny and Julie had a wonderful afternoon together on a real date, something he hadn’t expected to do due to living in a van.

Meanwhile, while Alex is at work, he is almost cornered into participating in something shady that could get him locked up. Alex walks out on his job instead, staring down certain doom in order to keep doing the right thing. But then a letter arrives that changes everything, making Alex wonder whether it is right to do something wrong to make something right.

Atlanta auteur Park is really on to something with Always Smile, as the story will keep surprising you throughout its runtime. The outer simplicity of the narrative is just a cover for a complex series of unconventional moves that work brilliantly. Park sets up a very straightforward premise: two homeless brothers set out to rescue a woman held captive. He sets it up fast so that in the first two minutes, we have both captive women and homeless brothers.

“…two homeless brothers set out to rescue a woman held captive…”

And the third act fulfills the promise with an action-packed sequence of a ragtag raid on a sex trafficker’s warehouse. But between these events, we get to run through the screenplay’s labyrinth of fun, with every turn sending us in a completely unexpected direction. Then there is the clever coda set that is a movie unto itself, three years later. There are even some choices that on the surface seem like mistakes, such as the scene that shows the home life of police officer Carl, played by Brandon Dunlap. As Dunlap only appears again as a cop in the finale, it seems strange to give him this amount of character development. But like all of the other unusual decisions Park makes in his script, it works perfectly with the whole shebang.

There is an understanding in Always Smile of how important the peaks and valleys are in terms of emotional engagement. Park makes you share every good thing that happens to his characters because of all the times we see them get dragged across the pavement. There are also many times we go way deeper into developing much richer backstories than are usually found in thrillers. There are seemingly small details that later gain much more significance once secrets are revealed. Keeping the stakes high and the velocity going. This is well demonstrated by Park’s knockout performance as Alex, as he can do gritty realism with a lot of empathy and charisma. Park the actor gets to be the flesh and blood yin-yang of success and defeat simultaneously, and you will feel every inch of it. While the visuals and music are standard cheap thrills, the story is neo-pulp elevated to a much higher level. Always Smile is an unpredictable character-driven drama wrapped in the stainless steel shell of a street thriller. It will make your heart warm and pound at the same time.