I can be a bit judgmental, so I tried to give Tom Logan the benefit of the doubt. I dimmed my cynical eye before this man, a hayseed so dumb that he ploughs a tract of land filled with coal. But Tom doesn’t reward a patient viewer, nor does anything else in Human Hearts. The movie is the fakest of fables, from its first scene of matte-painted, Ozark idyll to its last, arch lines of dime-store dialogue. And Tom (House Peters) is the dullest sort of hero. He’s good not because he chooses to do right, but because he was raised to do it, and since his perspective never develops, he’ll keep on doing it. Tom is immobile between the ears.
