Ron Howard’s Skyward

An early, made-for-television effort from Ron Howard, Ron Howard’s Skyward follows wheelchair-bound high-schooler Julie Ward (Suzy Gilstrap) as she discovers a passion for flying after a surreptitious trip to a nearby airfield. It’s subsequently not long before Julie is receiving airborne lessons from a local flight instructor named Billie Dupree (Bette Davis), with the narrative also detailing Julie’s growing friendship with an affable fellow student (Ben Marley’s Scott Billings) and said airfield’s affable mechanic (Howard Hesseman’s Koup Trenton). The early part of Ron Howard’s Skyward, though, details the various indignities experienced by Gilstrap’s character, as Julie is, for example, embarrassed by her new teacher and unable to use the non-accessible girl’s bathroom. It’s fairly tedious stuff that’s compounded by a lack of narrative momentum and an almost aggressively deliberate pace, with, in terms of the latter, the movie’s slowness ultimately preventing the viewer from working up any interest in (or enthusiasm for) the protagonist’s feel-good antics. The eye-rolling predictability of Nancy Sackett’s screenplay exacerbates the movie’s less-than-watchable atmosphere, as there’s virtually nothing that occurs within Ron Howard’s Skyward that one doesn’t see coming from miles away (eg Julie’s parents forbid her from flying, Julie fights with Scott, etc, etc) – which ultimately prevents the finale from packing the uplifting, emotional punch for which Howard is obviously striving.

* out of ****