God’s Not Dead 2
A Shameful Immoral Propaganda Piece
Good lord (no pun intended) this movie was.. What’s the best way to describe it? Imagine a film with a premise so blasphemous, so stupid, so devoid of any realism or redemption that it still manages to make decent money based on its stupendous propaganda that is almost offensive and asinine! That film would be God’s Not Dead 2. A film that surprisingly manages to outdo it’s predecessor by being more ridiculous in its one-sided view of religion by not only creating absolutely ridiculous plot threads to preach it’s contradictory lessons, but attempts to relay this message of “If you’re not with God, then to hell with you because you’re a bad human being in denial” type construct and it expects its audience to cash in and take it seriously. Well to this, I say to the filmmakers that if you’re going to make a movie about religion, the first thing you should do is get the idea of religion, in this case, Christianity or at least its morals, correct. For starters, like its predecessor, any character that is an Atheist or a non-Christian is either really evil, really shallow, or in denial of their faith because they’re just really hateful Christians on the inside. Even though there is one character who is an Atheist that doesn’t represent evil or denial, who is actually a lawyer played by Jesse Metcalfe representing Melissa Joan Hart’s character in the film, he is as boring and undeveloped as a character of his caliber could be in a movie like this.
The story is about public school teacher Grace (hmm..) Wesley going to trial to get reinstated and save her job after a controversy about her answer to a student’s question about Jesus. First of all, this plot is ridiculous and something like this would never make it to a court on the level that this film presents it to be. Secondly, even if this is the case, there was so much potential to make this an intriguing religious film. Instead, this film focuses on one side of the argument, and even the one sided argument are the things we have already seen from the first film, which basically is characters going into the ideology that “Science is not everything, therefore things that can’t be explained can only be possible because, you know, GOD!” I kid you not, there is a scene in this film that involves prayer and a concert being the miracle Grace needs to win this case. Seriously. This is not a good courtroom drama, character study, or religious film. It’s just bad. But without further ado, let’s cover the positives and negatives.
Positives:
The unintentionally hilarious moments – This film has scenes of complete ludicrous and over the top acting and dialogue that I couldn’t help but laugh so I guess that’s a positive.
Negatives:
The plot – This thing makes itself up along the way
The bad message it sends out – If you’re looking for a religious tone of a film that inspires forgiveness and love, this isn’t the film for you. Like the previous film, any person who isn’t Christian in this movie is either boring or just plain villainously portrayed hate mongers with no real moral redemption. This whole gives off this appeal that any non-believer are confused human beings with no happiness or love in their hearts.
Run time – Clocking in at just over two hours, this film could’ve easily been just an hour tv special on Lifetime.
Filming and Direction – Speaking of Lifetime, this film looks like it was made for television. Nothing looks or feels cinematic in this movie
Final Grade: F