The Watsons Go to Birmingham

Watsons Go to Birmingham is well-meaning to a fault and would play well as a teaching tool in elementary school classrooms.

Hallmark Channel’s warm but sometimes thin adaptation of The Watsons Go to Birmingham, based on Christopher Paul Curtis’s award-winning children’s book, is at first a welcome departure from the network’s usual Slanket-ready movies.

The Watsons are a fine family to spend two hours with (Wood Harris is a particular stand-out as the jovial father), but a story that instead reveals more personal acts of heroism might have elevated its impact just that much further.

While the film's tone may fit the kind of fuzzy warmth of most Hallmark Channel fare, it doesn't fit the tension and brutality of what African Americans experienced in Alabama in 1963.