Critics Personally Attack Trump Supporter Zachary Levi

www.hollywoodintoto.com

Zachary Levi hasn’t been canceled by Hollywood for supporting President Donald Trump.

Not yet, at least.

The star keeps saying he has new projects that should keep him busy. He’s one of the lucky ones.

Conservative actors are routinely punished for their beliefs. The New Blacklist is alive and well.

That doesn’t mean the “Shazam!” alum escaped professional punishment for his views. Select movie critics have weaponized his beliefs against him.

It happened this weekend.

Indiewire’s review of Levi’s “The Unbreakable Boy” reads like a political screed, not a critical assessment. It’s also aggressively anti-religion, assuming few if any readers are people of faith.

The film casts Levi as the father of a boy who has both autism and brittle bone disease. The fact-based yarn hails from Lionsgate and was directed by Jon Gunn of “Ordinary Angels” fame.

It deserves a sober hearing. All films do.

Now, consider how Indiewire’s critic engages with the material. The review doesn’t start well, launching into a rant on separating the art from the artist.

It’s tough to accept Zachary Levi as the beleaguered father of an autistic child when the former “Shazam!” star has publicly sworn his allegiance to a man who believes that vaccines cause autism.

It gets worse.

In a perfect vacuum, it would be possible to imagine how Kingdom Story Company’s (“I Still Believe,” “Jesus Revolution,” etc.) latest appeal to megachurch America might serve as a flimsy source of comfort for some hypothetical couple who’s struggling to raise a child with intellectual differences — a struggle that will only get a whole lot harder if the administration Levi supports decides to eliminate the DOE, which could severely impact the learning opportunities available to the kids most at risk of being left behind.

This is a movie review, right, not a “guilt by association” jamboree or MSNBC op-ed? Later, the scribe refers to Levi’s “weirdly swole brand of smiling ignorance.”

It’s notable that Indiewire’s Facebook page let readers tee off on the critic’s unprofessional approach.

Harrison Boyd: This is such an immature and biased review. Yes, Zachary Levi supported Trump but that doesn’t mean he believes everything Trump does. Politics aren’t binary. Critique it on its quality not the degrees of separation from Trump. All I know is that as a father of an autistic son, this trailer brought me to tears.

John Bowen: Whether or not I agree with his politics or not doesn’t matter and nor should it for you to give us a non biased critique of the actual movie for which he is merely an actor in. This is dumb and unsubscribing from indiewire.

Aarón Acuña: Awful critique. It looks like Indie wire has no knowledge what an actor is. If you can’t separate an actor’s political views from the characters he/she portrays on screen you should not be writing about cinema, you should not be writing about anything, you should not write at all.

Andrew Boat: God, the writers at this publication are so insufferable and simply cannot disconnect personal politics from unrelated art. This take says more about YOU than this film.

Alex Kay: This critic makes me wonder if they would have written a review of SCREAM 6 without mentioning Melissa Barrera’s support for palestine in that same review

This critic isn’t alone.

The Hollywood Reporter’s review of “The Unbreakable Boy” features this aside.

Levi is a likable presence (at least onscreen — discuss among yourselves emphasis added), but he seems ill-equipped to handle his character’s darker aspects.

Would this critic say the same about Alec Baldwin, a star with a litany of terrible headlines trailing him before he accidentally shot and killed cinematographer Haylyna Hutchins on the set of “Rust.”

This reporter has listened to roughly a dozen recent interviews with Levi. He consistently comes off as kind, thoughtful and uplifting. We never know what an actor is truly like off-screen, but there’s little evidence that Levi is some sort of monster when the cameras stop rolling.

Just the opposite.

Now, let’s judge his screen work fairly and not hold his views against him. Readers deserve nothing less. The same applies to Levi and his cast mates.

Editor’s Note: It’s a brutal time to be an independent journalist, but it’s never been more necessary given the sorry state of the corporate press. If you’re enjoying Hollywood in Toto, I hope you’ll consider leaving a coin (or two) in our Tip Jar.