Lionel Mandrake
Member
Okay, firstly, I want to start off by saying this isn't an attack on anyone's religion. Every time I make fun of Christian entertainment, someone gets pissed off. Look, I've got no problem with spirituality whatsoever, but these movies suck regardless of faith. And also, I don't remember saying I wasn't Christian myself. You all just assumed it, you judgmental a-holes.... Okay... You probably have good reason to assume whatever, but when I was 12, I signed my soul over to the Power Team...
And they said that they'd give it to Jesus for me, so whatever, I guess I'll see you sons of bitches in Heaven. They also broke a lot of cement blocks. I don't know what the religious connection was there, but... I'm no theologian.
Anyway, some time ago I watched God's Not Dead with my grandmother, and I shared my thoughts. So, some people wanted to know my opinions on this new movie. Nobody propositioned to watch this movie with me, so I really wasn't planning to see it. But today I found myself with four hours to kill and thought catching a flick would pass the time. I saw that this movie was playing and debated seeing it, but then I thought, "Mandrake, your time is valuable. You don't have to waste two hours of your life to write some rambling post about a garbage movie. You're better than that! You deserve better!"
Yeah!
But then I looked at what else was playing...
And said, "Fuck it. I'll watch the Jesus movie."
I go into the theater and I'm all alone. Come to think about it, I've heard jack shit about this movie. Nobody's asked me about it. It's barely registered on my Facebook feed. I probably wouldn't even know it existed if it wasn't for GAF. According to Wikipedia, while God's Not Dead brought in over $60 million, this one has so far only gotten $12 million. Maybe it has something to with the posters making it look like a horror movie.
Anyway, eventually a family of five old people came in and sat in the very front row, allowing me to post freely without disturbing anyone. Which is good, because I needed to make notes to remember all this stuff...
The movie starts with a narration saying "This is the story of 12 souls..." Which really was a bad start, because I already thought God's Not Dead had way too many plot threads. The first five to ten minutes of this movie is essentially the filmmakers just emptying a dump truck of characters. So let's go through the rundown.
==THE CHARACTERS==
Pastor Matt- Played by Ted McGinley. I guess he's like our main character? He seems to be in the movie for the most amount of time. He runs a church. He's devout... Not much more to say.
Pastor Matt's wife- She's barren.
Samantha- Played by Mira Sorvino. Homeless single mother, living out of her car and through homeless shelters. She doesn't seem to believe in God, but seems interested in what he's selling.
Lily- Samantha's precocious daughter. Prays all the time, and is so adorable you'll wish she would just shut up.
Lee Majors and Cybill Shepherd- Played by Lee Majors and Cybill Shepherd. They are super sad because their daughter died. They're old.
Pretty Boy and his brother Kriminal- They are in a gang. They do gang stuff.
Nefarious- Evil incarnate.
Maggie- A homeless pregnant girl just about ready to give birth.
Medic Guy- He's a medic. He doesn't seem to be a good one.
Medic Guy's Nurse Wife- She yells at Medic Guy sometimes.
Evil lawyer woman- She's gonna get those Christians.
Samwise Gamgee- Played by the kid from The Goonies. He helps Frodo take the Ring to Mount Doom. Is also an atheist douche, dating evil lawyer woman.
PTSD Marine- He saw his friend get shot down in a chopper, and now he has PTSD.
Suicidal girl- Played by Alexa Vega. She tries to kill herself by eating Chinese food she's allergic to. Which is how I want to go. She lives though, and falls in love with PTSD Marine.
Joe- Played by Brian Bosworth. A mysterious man with a checkered past, but who found God and devotes his life to helping strangers he meets. Has a shitload of cancer.
Mysterious man with cross- Shows up at the beginning to preach to people. Disappears until the end of the movie.
Okay, I'm probably forgetting someone, but fuck it. We have to get moving.
==THE STORY==
We begin with a bible verse saying that faith requires actions, before we get a narration from Ted McGinley talking about how people don't remember what the cross means. Then we're at a hospital and the movie actually starts.
This is where we meet most of our characters. Medic Guy is seen working on someone in an ambulance. Lee Majors is seen getting a check-up. Mira Sorvino's daughter has a fever. Joe is literally rotting from the inside out from all the cancer he has. Suicidal girl is being examined by Samwise, who is just like Dr. House, minus the charisma. He tells the nurse, who is the Medic Guy's wife, that the Chinese food was a suicide attempt, because she has scars on her wrists.
Mira Sorvino is trying to get the doctors to look at her daughter's fever (Which is not mentioned after this scene, and just goes away), but the wait is too long. Joe tells the guy at the desk to let them take his spot in the line, not like HE'S FUCKING DYING or anything. After the girl gets checked out, Joe asks where they're staying and learns that they're homeless. He says he's going to stay at a friend's place, and offers to let them stay in his house for the night. They agree to, and it turns out that his friend is Jesus, so he walks out into the street and sleeps on a bench in the cold.
I would have just, I don't know.... Slept in another room in the house or something, but that's just me. I guess he can't because he's a single man and she's a single woman, so that would be too scandalous for a Christian movie.
Ted McGinley is driving around and runs into this mysterious black guy dragging around a cross. He asks various people "Do you believe?!" McGinley explains to him that he's Ted McGinley, so the answer is yes. But as they talk, they hear a commotion from a white van nearby. I think the implication was that it was being stolen or something, but it really looked like there was no evidence that any wrongdoing was happening. Either way, the cross guy runs over and chastises the driver, telling him that God knows what he's doing and such. The driver laughs and points a gun at him, and the cross guy says, "I'm ready! Are you?" They continue laughing and drive off. But one guy-- Pretty Boy-- is shaken. He starts thinking about all that Jesus jazz as they drive to their mark.
Meanwhile, Ted McGinley sees the pregnant homeless girl eating out of a trashcan. He invites her to come stay at his house. They get there and his wife says, "No you can't just bring random vagrants to stay at our goddamn house. Put her in a hotel." And so he does.
Our young ne'erdowells park outside a house. This is where Nefarious and his gang live. Pretty Boy and his gang have got to steal the money inside, so they carefully plot out the most ingenious criminal plan to ever grace-...
They just drive the van into the side of the house. It's like a gag from GTA V or something. You can just imagine hearing Michael yell "Dammit, Trevor!" Pretty Boy waits outside and we see gunshots in the house's windows. Nefarious escapes and sees him, but is injured and unarmed, so he runs off. Pretty Boy's brother Kriminal is the only survivor, so they take off. They get split up and Pretty Boy hides in Ted McGinley's church. Joe is there. Joe encourages Pretty Boy to go inside and listen to the sermon. He does and starts praying for God to help him avoid the legal repercussions for his actions. God's an OG, so he allows it and the cops leave. Pretty Boy takes a little wooden cross and goes on his way.
The next day, someone gets run over by a steamroller. (Full disclosure, it may have been a bulldozer. I looked away for the split second you presumably got to see the whole vehicle) Medic Guy is first on the scene. He looks at him for a minute and then just shrugs and goes, "Look man... How are you set... afterlife-wise? 'Cause your shit is fucked." The dying guy starts praying with Medic Guy, and he hands him a little wooden cross that everybody seems to carry around in this movie. Dying guy's wife shows up and demands to see her husband, and the other emergency workers hold her back. Then dying guy dies, and they're just like, "Okay, he's dead. You can go look at his mangled corpse now," and let her go. So she's a little pissed. She's even more pissed when she finds the cross, because she apparently preferred for the emergency workers to do medical stuff.
I don't know what these filmmakers have against trying to give people medical attention.
Samwise is meeting with his super stuck-up lawyer girlfriend at a fancy restaurant. She's representing the dead guy's wife in suing the medic. Samwise is pissed because he doesn't get any respect. "I save people's lives and they just thank God. Plus everybody loves Chunk and Sloth more than me." This may be the same restaurant where Dean Cain broke up with his cancer-ridden girlfriend in the last movie. I'm not sure.
So yeah, Medic Guy's getting sued for pushing his religion on someone instead of giving him medical care. I know, right? Crazy. All he has to do is sign an apology and he'll keep his job and get a slap on the wrist, which would be convenient since he and his wife have two kids and are going through financial trouble. But nope. He won't apologize for doing the right thing. He explains this to his wife, who gets mad FOR SOME REASON. Women, right?
Lee Majors and Cybill Shepherd volunteer at a homeless shelter and run into Mira Sorvino and her precocious little kid, because conservative Christian audiences love them a precocious little kid in a movie. Especially if they die in the first twenty minutes.
(Fuck you, Sherwood Baptist Church. You're a church, not a movie studio. What you're doing a sin, and you should be ashamed of yourselves. I hope God gives you plagues.)
They invite her to stay with them indefinitely, because the kid reminds them of their daughter, aside from the whole being dead thing. Mira's too proud to accept such charity, but Lee Majors explains to her that he's old as fuck, and his wife's old as fuck, and they're just so old, and just.... Goddamn, are they fucking old. So Mira agrees to stay with them.
Suicidey goes to a bridge to kill herself, and coincidentally runs into PTSD, who goes there to angrily glare at the water. They joke about how they're both so fucked up, and they get coffee. It's not explicitly stated, but they probably banged. This movie is PG-13 after all.
Remember pregnant girl? Well, Ted McGinley's wife starts to feel bad about kicking a starving pregnant teen out of her house, so she asks her to come stay with them.
The pregnant girl says, "Oh, that's cool. When would you w-..."
"I'M BARREN!"
Awkward pause.
Also, apparently homeless pregnant girl is homeless and pregnant because her stepmom wanted her to get an abortion, so she ran away. She's received no pre-natal care and has been eating out of trashcans. So.... Good luck to that fetus.
Pretty Boy has been feeling pretty down about living in a gangsta's paradise. He's been holding onto the money they stole, and decides to give it to Ted McGinley instead. McGinley doesn't want the shitload of stolen drug money, but then says, "Well, maybe I could give it away." (I think I heard that correctly, maybe I misunderstood)
Joe is getting worse. He's coughing in every scene. He's a sweaty mess. His heart is nuclear from all the radioactive decay produced from the ungodly amount of cancer he has. He has apparently not gotten treatment for his Stage 4 leukemia. He says he has just been praying.
The Medic Guy goes to court, but there is no God in the American legal system, and he loses. And that smug lawyer lady gets even smugger.
Kriminal starts to get impatient about waiting for his money. He finds out that Pretty Boy gave it to Ted McGinley and he gets understandably pissed.
I'll never forget about the time my dad gave all of our money to Ted McGinley. Shit was rough.
Kriminal thinks about shooting Ted McGinley, presumably for ruining Happy Days. But he gets a change of heart and decides to confront Pretty Boy. They wrestle around, but then...*GASP* Nefarious!
(The only decent picture I could find of Nefarious's actor)
Nefarious knew that only the genius of Kriminal and Pretty Boy could come up with that meticulously planned heist. So he hunted them down and shoots Pretty Boy. Kriminal knocks him out and holds Pretty Boy in his arms. Pretty Boy urges him to find Jesus and hands him one of those little wooden crosses. Nefarious wakes up, so Kriminal has to run, with the nefarious Nefarious hot on his trail.
PTSD is having severe PTSD. He tells Suicidey that he's going to go away where he can't hurt anybody. She pleads with him to stay, but he hugs her goodbye and slips a wooden cross into her pocket, because people really want to get rid of these things. He bails on her, hitchhiking in an 18-wheeler. After he goes, the girl finds the cross and starts begging for God to bring him back.
Joe's dying. He's in the hospital and sends for someone to give a letter to Mira, so she'll know that he's dead. She quickly heads to the hospital to see him off, while Majors and Shepherd say they'll take her daughter to the park or something for a few hours.
And pregnant girl goes into labor. So McGinley and wife have to get her to the hospital.
Lost? Well, find your bearings. This shit's about to go off.
Quick recap:
Joe and Mira are in the hospital.
Samwise and the nurse are treating Joe at the hospital.
McGinley, wife, and pregnant girl are driving to hospital.
Majors, Shepherd, and little girl are driving to park.
PTSD is in a semi-truck to God-knows-where.
Medic guy is driving around, questioning life.
Lawyer lady is driving to... somewhere.
Kriminal is running from Nefarious on foot.
Pretty Boy is dead in a warehouse somewhere.
Now, pretty much everyone not dead or in a hospital finds themselves on this bridge. And that's when shit goes off the rails. I will not be able to adequately describe how quickly and explosively everything goes wrong. It was incredible. I had to stop myself from yelling out of pure excitement. I couldn't even process it. I'm not sure how the sequence of events happened.
Nefarious shoots Kriminal, and I think it scares someone into sliding their car into the other lane. A huge pile-up ensues. McGinley's car gets totaled and he has to start helping the pregnant girl give birth. Majors and Shepherds' car gets rear-ended through a barrier and starts to precariously teeter over the side of the bridge. The lawyer lady's car bursts into flames. Another car ramps off wrecked car and launches into the air, flipping until it lands on Nefarious and crushes him. It's like the Christian movie equivalent of this scene from Die Hard 4.
Medic and PTSD race to save Majors, Shepherd, and the girl. Majors pulls the heroic sacrifice card. "My leg's broken, son. You'll have to leave me." But then they just pull him out like everybody else... Like immediately. So, that line really didn't need to be there.
Now, the pregnant girl has given birth to a beautiful baby girl, but OH NO! No-longer-pregnant girl is dying! If only there was a medical prof-... Whatever. Ted McGinley's like, "Yeah, you lost a lot of blood." No-longer-pregnant girl says she wants them to take care of her daughter and some stuff about Jesus, and then she dies.
But what about lawyer lady?! She's unconscious, and her car is progressively getting more and more on fire. Medic guy helps Majors out of the car teetering over the bridge and looks to lawyer lady's car. Will he be able to get there in time? Will ANYONE be able to get there in time, then out of nowhere...
Dean Cain flies out of the sky!
He rips the lawyer lady out of the car before hurling it into the sky and blasting it with heat vision! And it turned out that Nefarious wasn't quite dead yet, so Dean Cain grabs him and he...
Alright. Dean Cain's not actually in this movie. The Medic guy gets the lawyer lady out of the car and everybody lives happily ever after.... Except pregnant girl... And Nefarious.... Nefarious deserved it though. What a prick.
Back at the hospital, Joe gets Mira to accept Jesus, then he dies. Samwise declares the time of death and everybody goes about their business, but then BAM! Joe bolts up. He's alive. Samwise wants to run some tests, but Joe tells him that he won't find any cancer. Samwise is confused, but the Nurse has her faith reaffirmed. She meets up with Medic and tells him how she was wrong. Medic says, "Yes you were, but I also should have focused on YOUR faith before the faith of strangers." So there's THAT little moral for you.
Samwise finds out his girlfriend was in an accident. He goes to check on her, and she's all amazed she's alive. She swears it's a miracle and is now all about some God. Samwise says, "Look, maybe we should get out of here." She says, "No. Not we," and walks out on him, in what seems like it's supposed to be a "Yeah! You go girl!" moment. But unless I'm forgetting something, Samwise didn't seem like that much of an asshole.
For starters, he gets like the least screentime of anybody. I guess he's the most expensive. But yeah, he's kind of got some bad bedside manner, and he wishes he got more credit for saving lives, but... That's it. He's not going Kevin Sorbo or anything. And whatever non-problems he has, he doesn't really get any chance to redeem himself for them. I kind of felt bad for him at the end.
Anyway, Kriminal gets approached by a cop or something and asks, "Do you go by... 'Kriminal'?" Kriminal looks at his little wooden cross and says, "Not anymore." McGinley and wife look at baby in the nursery. Lee Majors gets a cast. PTSD and Suicidey reunite. Then we see the magic cross guy walking down the street and the movie ends.
Now, if you can get all of that, I'll be impressed.
==THOUGHTS==
It's dumb, but I feel like a lot of people already knew that. But the movie's biggest problem, as was in God's Not Dead is that it has TOO MUCH going on.
Look at this...
A soldier with PTSD struggles to return to life, but winds up meeting a suicidal girl and they share a strange connection. Together they learn about faith and love, and maybe they can rebuild each other's lives.
THAT'S A MOVIE! Possibly a pretty solid one.
How about...
A single mother finds herself on the streets with her young daughter. A kindly old couple takes them into their home, and together they heal the wounds of their past.
That's a movie.
A pastor and his wife find themselves taking in a troubled girl who's 8 months pregnant.
That's a movie.
Two brothers born into crime face a divide when one finds faith.
Movie.
A medic faces trouble when he prays for a dying man as opposed to giving him treatment.
That's.... That's fucking garbage either way.
But you get my point. Almost all of these plots are enough to get fleshed out and carry a movie. Perhaps build up a strong story where one might be able to input messages on faith and Christianity with nuance and intrigue. But "No, fuck that. Let's just savagely chop them up and shove them into a soup can and throw the soup can at movie theaters, because Christians will like it, because they can't not like it, because they think by not liking they'll piss off their God! Keep shoveling them this shit! They don't have a choice!"
But I have to admit I found the Medic plot interesting, not from a story standpoint, but because it so closely mirrors the ending of God's Not Dead, that I feel like it has to have stemmed from criticism over that movie's ending. Like, they saw people complain about the ludicrous nature of that ending and decided, "Let's make another movie and explain why the ending is good." So they doubled down on the prayer-over-pills stuff as if now audiences would think, "Oh! Now I get it!" But of course it's a complete failure.
And I have to applaud the ludicrously climactic ending. There's no restraint and it's glorious.
So there you have it. The movie won't entertain anybody. And it won't save anybody. Christian entertainment still can't catch a break. But hey, that Risen trailer they showed before the movie looked kind of neat. Too bad I can't find anything about it online. But plenty of shit like Faith of our Fathers.
Anyway, these movies are still better than Sherwood Baptist movies.
I wish somebody would turn that church into a strip club.
And they said that they'd give it to Jesus for me, so whatever, I guess I'll see you sons of bitches in Heaven. They also broke a lot of cement blocks. I don't know what the religious connection was there, but... I'm no theologian.
Anyway, some time ago I watched God's Not Dead with my grandmother, and I shared my thoughts. So, some people wanted to know my opinions on this new movie. Nobody propositioned to watch this movie with me, so I really wasn't planning to see it. But today I found myself with four hours to kill and thought catching a flick would pass the time. I saw that this movie was playing and debated seeing it, but then I thought, "Mandrake, your time is valuable. You don't have to waste two hours of your life to write some rambling post about a garbage movie. You're better than that! You deserve better!"
Yeah!
But then I looked at what else was playing...
And said, "Fuck it. I'll watch the Jesus movie."
I go into the theater and I'm all alone. Come to think about it, I've heard jack shit about this movie. Nobody's asked me about it. It's barely registered on my Facebook feed. I probably wouldn't even know it existed if it wasn't for GAF. According to Wikipedia, while God's Not Dead brought in over $60 million, this one has so far only gotten $12 million. Maybe it has something to with the posters making it look like a horror movie.
Anyway, eventually a family of five old people came in and sat in the very front row, allowing me to post freely without disturbing anyone. Which is good, because I needed to make notes to remember all this stuff...
The movie starts with a narration saying "This is the story of 12 souls..." Which really was a bad start, because I already thought God's Not Dead had way too many plot threads. The first five to ten minutes of this movie is essentially the filmmakers just emptying a dump truck of characters. So let's go through the rundown.
==THE CHARACTERS==
Pastor Matt- Played by Ted McGinley. I guess he's like our main character? He seems to be in the movie for the most amount of time. He runs a church. He's devout... Not much more to say.
Pastor Matt's wife- She's barren.
Samantha- Played by Mira Sorvino. Homeless single mother, living out of her car and through homeless shelters. She doesn't seem to believe in God, but seems interested in what he's selling.
Lily- Samantha's precocious daughter. Prays all the time, and is so adorable you'll wish she would just shut up.
Lee Majors and Cybill Shepherd- Played by Lee Majors and Cybill Shepherd. They are super sad because their daughter died. They're old.
Pretty Boy and his brother Kriminal- They are in a gang. They do gang stuff.
Nefarious- Evil incarnate.
Maggie- A homeless pregnant girl just about ready to give birth.
Medic Guy- He's a medic. He doesn't seem to be a good one.
Medic Guy's Nurse Wife- She yells at Medic Guy sometimes.
Evil lawyer woman- She's gonna get those Christians.
Samwise Gamgee- Played by the kid from The Goonies. He helps Frodo take the Ring to Mount Doom. Is also an atheist douche, dating evil lawyer woman.
PTSD Marine- He saw his friend get shot down in a chopper, and now he has PTSD.
Suicidal girl- Played by Alexa Vega. She tries to kill herself by eating Chinese food she's allergic to. Which is how I want to go. She lives though, and falls in love with PTSD Marine.
Joe- Played by Brian Bosworth. A mysterious man with a checkered past, but who found God and devotes his life to helping strangers he meets. Has a shitload of cancer.
Mysterious man with cross- Shows up at the beginning to preach to people. Disappears until the end of the movie.
Okay, I'm probably forgetting someone, but fuck it. We have to get moving.
==THE STORY==
We begin with a bible verse saying that faith requires actions, before we get a narration from Ted McGinley talking about how people don't remember what the cross means. Then we're at a hospital and the movie actually starts.
This is where we meet most of our characters. Medic Guy is seen working on someone in an ambulance. Lee Majors is seen getting a check-up. Mira Sorvino's daughter has a fever. Joe is literally rotting from the inside out from all the cancer he has. Suicidal girl is being examined by Samwise, who is just like Dr. House, minus the charisma. He tells the nurse, who is the Medic Guy's wife, that the Chinese food was a suicide attempt, because she has scars on her wrists.
Mira Sorvino is trying to get the doctors to look at her daughter's fever (Which is not mentioned after this scene, and just goes away), but the wait is too long. Joe tells the guy at the desk to let them take his spot in the line, not like HE'S FUCKING DYING or anything. After the girl gets checked out, Joe asks where they're staying and learns that they're homeless. He says he's going to stay at a friend's place, and offers to let them stay in his house for the night. They agree to, and it turns out that his friend is Jesus, so he walks out into the street and sleeps on a bench in the cold.
I would have just, I don't know.... Slept in another room in the house or something, but that's just me. I guess he can't because he's a single man and she's a single woman, so that would be too scandalous for a Christian movie.
Ted McGinley is driving around and runs into this mysterious black guy dragging around a cross. He asks various people "Do you believe?!" McGinley explains to him that he's Ted McGinley, so the answer is yes. But as they talk, they hear a commotion from a white van nearby. I think the implication was that it was being stolen or something, but it really looked like there was no evidence that any wrongdoing was happening. Either way, the cross guy runs over and chastises the driver, telling him that God knows what he's doing and such. The driver laughs and points a gun at him, and the cross guy says, "I'm ready! Are you?" They continue laughing and drive off. But one guy-- Pretty Boy-- is shaken. He starts thinking about all that Jesus jazz as they drive to their mark.
Meanwhile, Ted McGinley sees the pregnant homeless girl eating out of a trashcan. He invites her to come stay at his house. They get there and his wife says, "No you can't just bring random vagrants to stay at our goddamn house. Put her in a hotel." And so he does.
Our young ne'erdowells park outside a house. This is where Nefarious and his gang live. Pretty Boy and his gang have got to steal the money inside, so they carefully plot out the most ingenious criminal plan to ever grace-...
They just drive the van into the side of the house. It's like a gag from GTA V or something. You can just imagine hearing Michael yell "Dammit, Trevor!" Pretty Boy waits outside and we see gunshots in the house's windows. Nefarious escapes and sees him, but is injured and unarmed, so he runs off. Pretty Boy's brother Kriminal is the only survivor, so they take off. They get split up and Pretty Boy hides in Ted McGinley's church. Joe is there. Joe encourages Pretty Boy to go inside and listen to the sermon. He does and starts praying for God to help him avoid the legal repercussions for his actions. God's an OG, so he allows it and the cops leave. Pretty Boy takes a little wooden cross and goes on his way.
The next day, someone gets run over by a steamroller. (Full disclosure, it may have been a bulldozer. I looked away for the split second you presumably got to see the whole vehicle) Medic Guy is first on the scene. He looks at him for a minute and then just shrugs and goes, "Look man... How are you set... afterlife-wise? 'Cause your shit is fucked." The dying guy starts praying with Medic Guy, and he hands him a little wooden cross that everybody seems to carry around in this movie. Dying guy's wife shows up and demands to see her husband, and the other emergency workers hold her back. Then dying guy dies, and they're just like, "Okay, he's dead. You can go look at his mangled corpse now," and let her go. So she's a little pissed. She's even more pissed when she finds the cross, because she apparently preferred for the emergency workers to do medical stuff.
I don't know what these filmmakers have against trying to give people medical attention.
Samwise is meeting with his super stuck-up lawyer girlfriend at a fancy restaurant. She's representing the dead guy's wife in suing the medic. Samwise is pissed because he doesn't get any respect. "I save people's lives and they just thank God. Plus everybody loves Chunk and Sloth more than me." This may be the same restaurant where Dean Cain broke up with his cancer-ridden girlfriend in the last movie. I'm not sure.
So yeah, Medic Guy's getting sued for pushing his religion on someone instead of giving him medical care. I know, right? Crazy. All he has to do is sign an apology and he'll keep his job and get a slap on the wrist, which would be convenient since he and his wife have two kids and are going through financial trouble. But nope. He won't apologize for doing the right thing. He explains this to his wife, who gets mad FOR SOME REASON. Women, right?
Lee Majors and Cybill Shepherd volunteer at a homeless shelter and run into Mira Sorvino and her precocious little kid, because conservative Christian audiences love them a precocious little kid in a movie. Especially if they die in the first twenty minutes.
(Fuck you, Sherwood Baptist Church. You're a church, not a movie studio. What you're doing a sin, and you should be ashamed of yourselves. I hope God gives you plagues.)
They invite her to stay with them indefinitely, because the kid reminds them of their daughter, aside from the whole being dead thing. Mira's too proud to accept such charity, but Lee Majors explains to her that he's old as fuck, and his wife's old as fuck, and they're just so old, and just.... Goddamn, are they fucking old. So Mira agrees to stay with them.
Suicidey goes to a bridge to kill herself, and coincidentally runs into PTSD, who goes there to angrily glare at the water. They joke about how they're both so fucked up, and they get coffee. It's not explicitly stated, but they probably banged. This movie is PG-13 after all.
Remember pregnant girl? Well, Ted McGinley's wife starts to feel bad about kicking a starving pregnant teen out of her house, so she asks her to come stay with them.
The pregnant girl says, "Oh, that's cool. When would you w-..."
"I'M BARREN!"
Awkward pause.
Also, apparently homeless pregnant girl is homeless and pregnant because her stepmom wanted her to get an abortion, so she ran away. She's received no pre-natal care and has been eating out of trashcans. So.... Good luck to that fetus.
Pretty Boy has been feeling pretty down about living in a gangsta's paradise. He's been holding onto the money they stole, and decides to give it to Ted McGinley instead. McGinley doesn't want the shitload of stolen drug money, but then says, "Well, maybe I could give it away." (I think I heard that correctly, maybe I misunderstood)
Joe is getting worse. He's coughing in every scene. He's a sweaty mess. His heart is nuclear from all the radioactive decay produced from the ungodly amount of cancer he has. He has apparently not gotten treatment for his Stage 4 leukemia. He says he has just been praying.
The Medic Guy goes to court, but there is no God in the American legal system, and he loses. And that smug lawyer lady gets even smugger.
Kriminal starts to get impatient about waiting for his money. He finds out that Pretty Boy gave it to Ted McGinley and he gets understandably pissed.
I'll never forget about the time my dad gave all of our money to Ted McGinley. Shit was rough.
Kriminal thinks about shooting Ted McGinley, presumably for ruining Happy Days. But he gets a change of heart and decides to confront Pretty Boy. They wrestle around, but then...*GASP* Nefarious!
(The only decent picture I could find of Nefarious's actor)
Nefarious knew that only the genius of Kriminal and Pretty Boy could come up with that meticulously planned heist. So he hunted them down and shoots Pretty Boy. Kriminal knocks him out and holds Pretty Boy in his arms. Pretty Boy urges him to find Jesus and hands him one of those little wooden crosses. Nefarious wakes up, so Kriminal has to run, with the nefarious Nefarious hot on his trail.
PTSD is having severe PTSD. He tells Suicidey that he's going to go away where he can't hurt anybody. She pleads with him to stay, but he hugs her goodbye and slips a wooden cross into her pocket, because people really want to get rid of these things. He bails on her, hitchhiking in an 18-wheeler. After he goes, the girl finds the cross and starts begging for God to bring him back.
Joe's dying. He's in the hospital and sends for someone to give a letter to Mira, so she'll know that he's dead. She quickly heads to the hospital to see him off, while Majors and Shepherd say they'll take her daughter to the park or something for a few hours.
And pregnant girl goes into labor. So McGinley and wife have to get her to the hospital.
Lost? Well, find your bearings. This shit's about to go off.
Quick recap:
Joe and Mira are in the hospital.
Samwise and the nurse are treating Joe at the hospital.
McGinley, wife, and pregnant girl are driving to hospital.
Majors, Shepherd, and little girl are driving to park.
PTSD is in a semi-truck to God-knows-where.
Medic guy is driving around, questioning life.
Lawyer lady is driving to... somewhere.
Kriminal is running from Nefarious on foot.
Pretty Boy is dead in a warehouse somewhere.
Now, pretty much everyone not dead or in a hospital finds themselves on this bridge. And that's when shit goes off the rails. I will not be able to adequately describe how quickly and explosively everything goes wrong. It was incredible. I had to stop myself from yelling out of pure excitement. I couldn't even process it. I'm not sure how the sequence of events happened.
Nefarious shoots Kriminal, and I think it scares someone into sliding their car into the other lane. A huge pile-up ensues. McGinley's car gets totaled and he has to start helping the pregnant girl give birth. Majors and Shepherds' car gets rear-ended through a barrier and starts to precariously teeter over the side of the bridge. The lawyer lady's car bursts into flames. Another car ramps off wrecked car and launches into the air, flipping until it lands on Nefarious and crushes him. It's like the Christian movie equivalent of this scene from Die Hard 4.
Medic and PTSD race to save Majors, Shepherd, and the girl. Majors pulls the heroic sacrifice card. "My leg's broken, son. You'll have to leave me." But then they just pull him out like everybody else... Like immediately. So, that line really didn't need to be there.
Now, the pregnant girl has given birth to a beautiful baby girl, but OH NO! No-longer-pregnant girl is dying! If only there was a medical prof-... Whatever. Ted McGinley's like, "Yeah, you lost a lot of blood." No-longer-pregnant girl says she wants them to take care of her daughter and some stuff about Jesus, and then she dies.
But what about lawyer lady?! She's unconscious, and her car is progressively getting more and more on fire. Medic guy helps Majors out of the car teetering over the bridge and looks to lawyer lady's car. Will he be able to get there in time? Will ANYONE be able to get there in time, then out of nowhere...
Dean Cain flies out of the sky!
He rips the lawyer lady out of the car before hurling it into the sky and blasting it with heat vision! And it turned out that Nefarious wasn't quite dead yet, so Dean Cain grabs him and he...
Alright. Dean Cain's not actually in this movie. The Medic guy gets the lawyer lady out of the car and everybody lives happily ever after.... Except pregnant girl... And Nefarious.... Nefarious deserved it though. What a prick.
Back at the hospital, Joe gets Mira to accept Jesus, then he dies. Samwise declares the time of death and everybody goes about their business, but then BAM! Joe bolts up. He's alive. Samwise wants to run some tests, but Joe tells him that he won't find any cancer. Samwise is confused, but the Nurse has her faith reaffirmed. She meets up with Medic and tells him how she was wrong. Medic says, "Yes you were, but I also should have focused on YOUR faith before the faith of strangers." So there's THAT little moral for you.
Samwise finds out his girlfriend was in an accident. He goes to check on her, and she's all amazed she's alive. She swears it's a miracle and is now all about some God. Samwise says, "Look, maybe we should get out of here." She says, "No. Not we," and walks out on him, in what seems like it's supposed to be a "Yeah! You go girl!" moment. But unless I'm forgetting something, Samwise didn't seem like that much of an asshole.
For starters, he gets like the least screentime of anybody. I guess he's the most expensive. But yeah, he's kind of got some bad bedside manner, and he wishes he got more credit for saving lives, but... That's it. He's not going Kevin Sorbo or anything. And whatever non-problems he has, he doesn't really get any chance to redeem himself for them. I kind of felt bad for him at the end.
Anyway, Kriminal gets approached by a cop or something and asks, "Do you go by... 'Kriminal'?" Kriminal looks at his little wooden cross and says, "Not anymore." McGinley and wife look at baby in the nursery. Lee Majors gets a cast. PTSD and Suicidey reunite. Then we see the magic cross guy walking down the street and the movie ends.
Now, if you can get all of that, I'll be impressed.
==THOUGHTS==
It's dumb, but I feel like a lot of people already knew that. But the movie's biggest problem, as was in God's Not Dead is that it has TOO MUCH going on.
Look at this...
A soldier with PTSD struggles to return to life, but winds up meeting a suicidal girl and they share a strange connection. Together they learn about faith and love, and maybe they can rebuild each other's lives.
THAT'S A MOVIE! Possibly a pretty solid one.
How about...
A single mother finds herself on the streets with her young daughter. A kindly old couple takes them into their home, and together they heal the wounds of their past.
That's a movie.
A pastor and his wife find themselves taking in a troubled girl who's 8 months pregnant.
That's a movie.
Two brothers born into crime face a divide when one finds faith.
Movie.
A medic faces trouble when he prays for a dying man as opposed to giving him treatment.
That's.... That's fucking garbage either way.
But you get my point. Almost all of these plots are enough to get fleshed out and carry a movie. Perhaps build up a strong story where one might be able to input messages on faith and Christianity with nuance and intrigue. But "No, fuck that. Let's just savagely chop them up and shove them into a soup can and throw the soup can at movie theaters, because Christians will like it, because they can't not like it, because they think by not liking they'll piss off their God! Keep shoveling them this shit! They don't have a choice!"
But I have to admit I found the Medic plot interesting, not from a story standpoint, but because it so closely mirrors the ending of God's Not Dead, that I feel like it has to have stemmed from criticism over that movie's ending. Like, they saw people complain about the ludicrous nature of that ending and decided, "Let's make another movie and explain why the ending is good." So they doubled down on the prayer-over-pills stuff as if now audiences would think, "Oh! Now I get it!" But of course it's a complete failure.
And I have to applaud the ludicrously climactic ending. There's no restraint and it's glorious.
So there you have it. The movie won't entertain anybody. And it won't save anybody. Christian entertainment still can't catch a break. But hey, that Risen trailer they showed before the movie looked kind of neat. Too bad I can't find anything about it online. But plenty of shit like Faith of our Fathers.
Anyway, these movies are still better than Sherwood Baptist movies.
I wish somebody would turn that church into a strip club.
