Facing the Giants: A Fantasy Film

I’ve blogged a couple times before (here and here) about Facing the Giants, a film produced by a church in Atlanta that is currently in theatres. Barbara Nicolosi from Church of the Masses just posted her take on the film. Barbara is a critic whom I probably disagree with as often as I agree with her, most notably about Da Vinci Code and The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, but I think she’s hit the nail on the head with this one. Here’s part of her review, along with her summary of the film:

Facing the Giants from any serious perspective is a fantasy film. Its message is very dangerous for Christians, and scandalous for pagans. Adult Evangelical Christians watching Facing the Giants is like sex addicts watching the Spice Channel. (Nope. Not going to take it back.)

We are going to leave alone the fact that the film is badly acted, terribly written, completely lacking in imagery, and directed and shot without any style or evident skill. Let’s skip all that and just talk about the content problem.

The film tells the story of a poverty-stricken, generally disdained, losing football coach who drives a broken down truck and goes home at night to a devastatedly infertile wife. Incited by no particular plot point, the coach reads the Bible one day and then kneels down in a field (Why the hell is it always a field? Is that like in Zecharaiah somewhere?) and gives his life to Jesus. In short order after he utters the Evangelical commitment formula aloud, he wins back the esteem of his fellow townspeople, he turns around his terrible team so that they win the championship, somebody gives him a brand new shiny red truck, AND his infertile wife becomes pregnant!

WOW! Give me some of THAT Jesus-stuff!

Absolute fantasy stuff. The kind of thing that makes Christians puff out their chests proud to be on the winning team! This film fumbles deep, deep in the prosperity Gospel end zone. It is icky to tell people that they should be Christian because of the career and health benefits. We have the problem on the team of that embarrassingly unsuccessful crucified coach of ours.

Read the rest of her post here.