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Watching this film I'll admit it's quite entertaining, but it is a good central tenet played with a heavy dose of whimsical comedy making it feel like opportunities missed with a weak script. With the few remaining actual print editions of newspapers a young adult of 2025 can hardly know how important newspapers were a generation or more ago. Many cities had multiple publications with some having two editions a day. The newspaper was the conduit for all the news of that mattered. A true window to the world. So what if by some kind of unexplainable circumstance you could read the next day's paper today? You'd be both blessed and cursed. You could corner the stock market, possibly help prevent crimes and more. It would be a very heavy thing and if that premise could have been explored with more soul it may have been a contender as an all-time great. Not that the whimsy can't be superlative as in "It's A Wonderful Life", but this script just isn't on that level. Powell is a good protagonist, not unlike Jimmy Stewart, but he just doesn't deliver the beating heart Stewart brought to life in "It's A Wonderful Life" due more to the writers than by any fault of his own. Even though, as stated before, this is an entertaining film.

My first impression is can the parents just say emphatically to their kids stay away? Sure, it's a tempting empty lot most likely with more space than the street or adjacent properties where there was no problem with the kids playing on...but, it is private property and if it is known to be a problem then it should be an absolute iron-clad parental order of no playing/trespassing. OK, beyond that we have a ,mentally brittle woman who is highly offended by any trespassing and reacts accordingly. Perhaps the children see this as a game and in the fashion of kids they "poke the bear". That is a big red flag to which the repeated calls of Susan probably excited more while they should have been taken as a harbinger of much more. This should have been addressed by the parents even more as in: don't trespass and do not incite this neighbor. I can see this was not the case. Susan went beyond a reasonable stand your ground when she blindly shot through a door. She should have waited. If the lady pounding on the door shot through the door it would be wrong and it's just as wrong that Susan shot. If the door was coming apart and opening she would have had a leg to stand on and that's not the case. I'm sorry but I see justice served on Susan but not the parents that are held up as martyrs. They share guilt...maybe not criminal as such, but they contributed by their lack of control that was obvious and, perhaps, even more by unknown things like mocking the lady in front of their children. In the end an horrific outcome. I hope there is something to learn from here if it can be stripped to the core of right and wrong. That's a big charge to be sure. This was a different POV crime doc I think was actually well done even though I feel it needed more balance. I feel most folks can right that balance on their own though.