When Max Park (John Cho) is diagnosed with a brain tumour (肿瘤), his doctor gives him two options. He can have an operation to remove it, but the chances of making a full recovery are a paltry 20 per cent, or he can do nothing and be dead within a year. Because Max is a lone parent with a 15-year-old daughter Wally (Mia Isaac), who's beginning to consider major life choices―college, travel, boyfriends―Max decides it's more responsible to decline the operation. At least a year gives him time to prepare his daughter for the rest of her life without him.
To begin with, Max can't face telling Wally about his diagnosis, but he starts stage-managing her future straight away. Figuring that now is the time for his daughter to reunite with her mother, who walked out on them when Wally was a baby, he plans a great road trip from their South California home to New Orleans. He tells Wally that he wants her to accompany him to a college reunion―a strange idea, as she points out―but his hidden motive is to put mother and daughter in the same room. He also hopes the long cross-country drive will give them plenty of father-daughter bonding time: something that's now a limited resource.
For much of its runtime, Don't Make Me Go hits its familiar beats with a steady hand. Wally begins to rebel against her strait-aced (古板的) dad, even stealing out of their motel room one night to party with the locals in a Texan backwater. Max tries a bit too hard to make their road trip meaningful but gradually reveals he's not so square after all. Back in the day, he was an ambitious rock star who had the talent, but not the courage, to make it big. Director Hannah Marks, who co-wrote and starred in the excellent Gen Z romcom Banana Split, brings a low-key beauty to even the film's cheesiest moments. As soon as Max and Wally discover a shared love of Iggy Pop's 'The Passenger', you just know he's going to end up singing it at some point.
Sadly, Marks' self-restrained approach is undone by an awkward final act that arrives in a moment of narration (解说). It's perhaps no coincidence that screenwriter Vera Herbert has previously written nine episodes of This Is Us, a US drama series that is hardly good at going for the emotional problem. For this reason, Don't Make Me Go is a strange beast: a film that feels a little predictable until it snaps and stretches credulity to the limit (令人难以置信). Thankfully, Cho and Isaac's affecting performances are far better than the writing.
