Zigzag (2002)

With the decay in societal structure and the moral anomie that crept into the fabric of American life as the past century slipped away, the family drama has needed to be severely updated and revamped. Zigzag (2002) is a serious, touching, tragicomic reevaluation of the bonds and liabilities of blood relations. Playing alternately brash and pathetic as the drug-addicted father of a teenage autistic son, Wesley Snipes is both all-powerful and totally futile in raising his boy. Far from protecting and nurturing his offspring, Snipes’s consuming selfish needs place the innocent youth in a peril that he can hardly understand. Playing out with the pace of a true-crime thriller but with the pathos to tug the strings of a hardened hooker’s heart, Zigzag reaffirms that brotherly love can conquer the father of all evils.