Christian Movie Review the Measure of Your Faith
"Faith of Our Fathers," the latest Christian-themed movie from the studio that produced "God'southward Not Dead" and "Do You Believe?", tells the story of 2 men whose fathers fought in Vietnam and never came back. The two mismatched guys, ane a domesticated Christian yuppie, the other a rough sullen non-believer, squad up to go on a road trip to Washington D.C. to visit the Vietnam Memorial and find their fathers' names. Over the course of the improvisational trip, they butt heads, they open up, and the "faith of their fathers," revealed slowly over the form of the film though the surviving letters written habitation from Vietnam, opens their optics to redemption, grace and faith.
"Faith of Our Fathers" doesn't work, and not because of its Christian message. The main bug are the obvious script (every plot-twist tin be seen coming from miles downwardly the road), the bad interim, and the cheaply-washed, unconvincing Vietnam flashbacks. Director Carey Scott (who wrote the script with lead actors Kevin Downes and David A.R. White) seems to hope the bulletin will be enough. It's not.
Kevin Downes plays "John Paul George." His Beatles-inspired three offset names are used as a joke in almost every scene. He'southward a good Christian guy, engaged to to Cynthia, a cheerful woman (Candace Cameron Bure) who's busy planning their nuptials and practicing cooking meals for her husband-to-exist. At Cynthia's suggestion, he sets out to find a guy named Wayne, the son of the human his dad befriended in Vietnam. Landed in Mississippi, he finds Wayne living holed up in a hillbilly shack, eating food he shot himself and grumpy about everything. (Notice that their two first names add together up to "John Wayne." Subtle, this movie is not.)
John and Wayne have a bumpy beginning. Wayne has a bunch of letters from his dad in his possession that mention John's dad, just he refuses to hand them over. He demands payment for each one. He blusters and grunts and chews Twizzlers and chomps on a toothpick, and it's a performance full of broad indicating that calls to mind James Dean's advice to a young Dennis Hopper: During the filming of "Rebel Without a Cause," Hopper was so impressed past Dean that he started imitating Dean's mannerisms. Dean noticed, and pulled Hopper aside, proverb, "If you're going to smoke a cigarette onscreen, just smoke the cigarette. Don't human action like you're smoking the cigarette." David A.R. White is very busy acting similar he's chewing on Twizzlers, acting like he's doing everything. The grapheme is a grotesque stereotype, but nosotros soon learn of his hurting and malaise in a later scene, during the simply practiced-looking shot in the whole film, the two men sitting in bordering jail cells with aureate low-cal streaming in through the confined.
The impromptu road trip to D.C. is interspersed with flashbacks to Vietnam, showing their fathers condign friends in the rainy "jungle" of 1969. One-half of the time, the sun is clearly shining and there's faux rain coming down in the foreground. Dry out-ice fog billows at night. Adding to the lack of verisimilitude is that we see these ii men writing letters home on tiny scraps of paper with smudgy moisture pencils all every bit the rain pours downward on the paper, but back in the nowadays, the messages the men read are all written on pristine loose-leaf paper that looks similar information technology was torn out of a notebook yesterday. Details like this are not irrelevant. They matter.
In Vietnam, John'south dad Steven (Sean McGowan) and Wayne'south dad Eddie (Scott Whyte) form a bond. Steven reads his Bible all the time and the other soldiers rib him nigh it. His sergeant (Stephen Baldwin) scolds Eddie for talking about decease and Heaven and the afterlife to the soldiers who should be focused on staying alive. Shades of the Christian persecution complex. Eddie is cynical, but drawn to Steven'southward forcefulness and peace, and wonders if he's missing out on something. To requite credit where it's due, both actors do a very convincing job in their scenes, bringing along a believable sense of the fright and disorientation that comes with combat (especially when the confused commanders seem to exist setting them up to fail.) Their scenes feature the strongest proselytizing bulletin in the film, with Steven telling Eddie well-nigh Jesus and the Bible, but the actors "bring information technology" in a sincere and open up way. Again, it'south not the message that is the problem, ultimately. It's how it'due south delivered.
The wacky buddy route movie sections are strained and false, featuring many gigantic closeups of the men in the car behaving and reacting in broad ways to 1 another, and dark-green-screen roads stretching out through the rear window (with a couple of scenes showing what is evidently the same stretch of road). Along the way, they have adventures, they selection up hitchhikers, get into fights with rednecks and accidentally purchase a stolen machine. Meanwhile, nag-Cynthia puts in increasingly threatening calls to John most leaving her, fifty-fifty though she was the ane who suggested he detect Wayne in the beginning identify.
Many great films take explored Christian themes. At that place were the Biblical epics like D.W. Griffith's "Intolerance," or "Ben Hur" and "The Ten Commandments." More recently, at that place was the nail-hitting of Mel Gibson's visceral "The Passion of the Christ." These films brought forward an explicit Christian message and did so with brio and scope, not to mention artistic seriousness. There is no excuse for a film with Christian themes to slack off artistically, because those examples. More recently, there was "Calvary," with its story of redemption and sin in 1 small Irish town, or last year'southward Oscar-winning foreign picture show "Ida," which took issues of faith and devotion seriously, backdropped by ghosts of the Holocaust. Early on this twelvemonth came "Against the Sunday," a truthful story about three WWII pilots stranded in a life-raft in the Pacific. Information technology had a Christian message about strong religion in difficult times, and information technology was a well-done film. "Selma" showed how the faith of the ceremonious rights leaders helped them stay potent in unsafe times, with African-American churches calling on their long history of protest and resistance. "Selma" did not deign to the faithful, belittle them, or mock them. These are all serious films. Just the lightweight Christian films, films similar "Kirk Cameron Saves Christmas," or last year's dreadful "The Identical," or "Faith of Our Fathers", prioritize the bulletin in ways that are amateurish and obvious.
Sheila O'Malley
Sheila O'Malley received a BFA in Theatre from the University of Rhode Island and a Primary'southward in Acting from the Actors Studio MFA Programme. Read her answers to our Flick Dear Questionnaire hither.
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Faith of Our Fathers (2015)
96 minutes
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Source: https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/faith-of-our-fathers-2015
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