My Score: 5.6Terri is not a movie meant to wow you and primarily is a film about the struggle of a young 15 year old named Terri to get through everyday life. He is overweight, a social reject, wears pajamas to school, and lives with a dying uncle to name a few. It is fair to say that this movie is fairly depressing, but it has some comic relief.Terri is played by Jacob Wysocki, who gives a great performance and overall the acting is impressive. John C. Reilly is very solid as Principal Fitzgerald. Truthfully, the story doesn't offer much outside of the struggles of an overweight 15 year old, who is having to deal with a ton of unfortunate stress. I would only recommend to viewers who are interested in seeing a movie that really is about a struggling teen as it offers very little outside of that.

Terri is an overweight teenager who lives with his uncle who as far as I can tell has burgeoning dementia. His parents seem to have been absent for some time and as such his living situation isn't ideal. He's in trouble at school, predictably a target for the scum of the school. He ends up getting in trouble and playing truant as a result. Cue first unlikely event - the head teacher, under the guise of disciplining him decides to make a special effort with him, meeting with him every Monday morning to review progress, give him advice. This unwittingly brings him into a new circle of outsiders, notably Chad who attaches himself to him like a leech. Terri sees 2 fellow pupils indulging in a sex act in the home economics class, for which they are to be disciplined and expelled. He stands up for the girl though, partly as he has a soft spot for her but partly because he did actually witness some coercion on the part of the boy. Cue unlikely event number 2 - the girl is ostracised by fellow pupils for her behaviour which leads us nicely into unlikely event number 3: Terri humiliates himself to draw fire from a teacher who's about to discipline her for a misdemeanour. The girl takes a shine to Terri after this. The rest of the film seems to be about his thrill and terror trying to process her sudden affections for him, while having to deal with Chad's strangeness. It's all put together very competently and acted very well and has a nice feeling about it, but here's my fundamental problem with this movie. In my experience of kids that age, there's just no way an attractive teenage girl would be condemned by fellow pupils for that incident - she'd become famous overnight and wouldn't be lacking for friends, let alone go begging amongst the lowest echelons of the school class system. Furthermore, it's just too big a leap of faith to imagine her being interested in Terri. Someone will argue it's perfectly possible but in reality I just can't see it. Kids that age are so conscious of looks/appearances and what other people think - especially the good looking kids, so I can't buy this scenario at all. Also I found the head teacher's behaviour towards him extremely unlikely. Maybe school's changed since 23 years ago when I left but back then the best a kid like that could hope for from a teacher or head teacher was to be ignored. Sad but true. And I suspect that hasn't changed one bit. So while there's some lovely ideas in play here, and it's nice to imagine that fantasy world, it bears no reflection on the real world out there, which apparently the story's set in. So I just couldn't make the leap of faith and the film got away from me in the end and started to grate on me. This is a shame as there was some good acting, and it was a great setup for a story, just not that one. I suspect anyone experiencing Terri's kind of difficulties in the real world would find this saccharin tale deeply annoying.

The movie's not bad but the premise that Terry wears pajamas everywhere implausible. At the first sight of this if the police didn't pick him up & bring him home or to the station and he made it to school he would have been sent right home or sent to the principal's office until an adult or Child Services picked him up. Plus its hard to have compassion for someone who basically wears the same pajamas every day which would be unhygienic. And past all this we are supposed to believe the asst. principal never mentions it? While some of the characters are endearing some are not. You may want to spend your viewing time on a different movie.

Like other reviewers here I found the characters very poorly written, each one beginning and ending as an non-evolving caricature. The main character is someone who is seems content with his life as it is and has settled in to the role of caregiver to his uncle and apathetically likable outcast in his school.The films approach seems to be one of turning Terri's life experiences into utter banality in order to cope with the weight of their drama.Every character, especially Terri, has a shoulder-shrugged look at everything that goes on in the film. It's as though everyone is interacting with each other as though they have been desensitized to the point where even the most obnoxious behaviour is carried out with the the vigour of a sloth crawling along a tree branch to get to a leaf. That is this films ENORMOUS problem: in the end everything that occurs is treated with such a dull, tedious, and bored outlook that even the message of acceptance of who you are becomes a resignation more than a inspiration. Watching the last half of this movie was one of the most excruciating exercises in misplaced hopefulness I have ever experienced.