It would take some churlishness to deny the potency of the true story told by this biopic of Christina Noble, a Dubliner who founded homes for orphan children in Vietnam and Mongolia.
Those closing credits summing up a life of selfless achievement make you want to applaud. But they come at the end of a film that is as unsubtle as it is formulaic, both predictable and distressingly shapeless.
Its glaring problem is a flashback narrative that only slowly fills in her back story. It's an inexplicable decision by writer/director Bradley since it kicks us back and forth between past and present and we spend more than half the film wondering what took her to Vietnam.
The explanation, when it emerges, may be biographically accurate but it plays damn silly. Worse, the film provides us with no dramatic connection between her early life and her decision, once her kids have grown up, to embark on her worthy campaign.
It's like watching two films instead of one and the script resorts too often to a narrative shorthand, delivering 10-second scenes that seem to belong in a trailer.
The short version: dirt-poor slum family; Mum dies; Dad's a drunk; orphanage; pregnant at 16. Fast forward 30 years or so: slow triumph over indifference and petty bureaucracy.
