Wish Man

I can’t say Wish Man is a great film, or even a particularly good one. But it has heart, Steel & Co. make it likeable and writer-director Davies makes its emotional payoff pay off.

It’s a largely mechanical, on-the-nose, vaguely faith-oriented retelling of Shankwitz’s fraught life and the singular string of episodes that led the Arizona motorcycle cop to his true calling.

The resulting biographical drama squanders its compelling central storyline with a lengthy subplot involving crooked cops. Even if the incident is true, it lends an unnecessarily melodramatic tinge to what could have stood on its own as a powerful inspirational story.