Unless I strike a new vein of dusty old words as I mine through my hoarded papers, I will soon reach the end of writing from my college radio days that can be transferred to this site for digital preservation. I have a couple left, though, including this diatribe against a film that is among the worst on the filmographies of Mike Nichols, Annette Bening, Harrison Ford, and J.J. Abrams (the last contributor so early in his career that he hadn’t yet settled on his current billing). That’s quite a crew. This was originally delivered — with venom — on an episode of WWSP-90FM’s The Reel Thing.

Regarding Henry stars Harrison Ford as Henry Turner, a callous man who sustains a head injury during a convenience store robbery and finds his mind severely damaged. He has to relearn almost every aspect of his life: how to walk, how to speak, and who his loved ones are. It’s a movie that should be an emotional powerhouse: a man struggling to remember who he is and learning to be a better person in the process. It deserves to be incredibly moving and powerful. But Regarding Henry doesn’t even come close.

The problems begin and are most apparent in the script by Jeffrey Abrams. Abrams has the film school mechanics of screenwriting down: there’s meticulous foreshadowing, clear turning points, and the word “Ritz” represents more than just the cracker. What Abrams’s script is sorely lacking is characters or situations that mean anything to us. Despite admirable efforts by Ford, Annette Bening as his wife, and Bill Nunn as his physical therapist and new best friend, there’s nothing that can be done with characters that have all the emotional range of cardboard cutouts. The characters never connect emotionally with each other, much less the audience.

As if he recognizes these overwhelming flaws, director Mike Nichols seems to be trying to speed through the film as quickly as possible. Several scenes in the film last only a few seconds, as Nichols gives the characters just time enough to speak one or two lines before the film rockets to the next scene. Nichols also seems to have little interest in Henry’s physical recovery. We see Henry walk successfully on his first try, he speaks on one of the first attempts to pull words out of him, and is preparing to play basketball only minutes after we see him flat and unmoving in a hospital bed.

Nichols shows us Henry’s triumphs without letting us even glimpse his setbacks. The internal struggle of a person who has to relearn everything he is about is strangely missing. Henry seems to have little or no interest in discovering who he once was, and, therefore, the audience has little interest as well.

Regarding Henry could have been so much more. As it is, it’s a movie completely devoid of emotion, a series of interconnected plot devices played out by mannequins.

1 star, on the 4-star scale.