According to reviews, Facing the Giants is an amateur, formulaic movie that will strengthen Christian hearts and roll secular eyes. But whether this is as inconsequential as it sounds is not so clear.

By Evie Nagy

Press about the Christian football movie Facing the Giants, released last Friday, comes in the form of three stories: (1) Tiny-budget movie about overcoming adversity through God, produced by Baptist ministers with all volunteer cast, overcomes adversity itself by scoring national distribution; (2) Family-friendly, Christian-themed movie gets PG instead of G rating because Hollywood maybe hates Christians; (3) Football movie with unambiguous Christian message is hokey, predictable, and terribly made, but sweet in its own earnest way.

The stories practically write themselves, a lucky break for journalists who might have had a stickier time of it had the movie actually been good.

Alex and Stephen Kendrick, brothers and pastors at Sherwood Baptist Church in Georgia, gladly admit to having an evangelical agenda in producing the film, and Samuel Goldwyn Films saw it as an opportunity to tap a huge market of Christians tired of Hollywood films they say don’t reflect their values. The fact that Facing the Giants stinks as a movie allows critics to dismiss it while giving a politically correct nod to its good intentions (patting evangelicals on the head is the new PC), and the PG debacle gives sympathizers something to rally over. Had this humble Georgia congregation produced a nuanced, complicated story that ultimately landed on the side of God, commentators may have had to grapple with the potential power of a nationally-distributed film to inspire conversion.

The question is, should they have grappled with this anyway? Religiously-themed movies are hardly new, and increasingly hot in a post-Passion world, but rarely do individual congregations reach the multiplex with films created explicitly to spread The Word. The producers attribute their unbelievable luck to God’s hand, but surely there’s more to it. A few publications touch on the bigger picture. The San Francisco Chronicle notes that “major Hollywood companies, including the new Christian-focused Fox Faith distributor, are tuning into the potentially lucrative market of an estimated 80 million evangelicals and promise more religious fare in the next few months.”

But this misses the point of Facing the Giants, which Alex Kendrick calls “a ministry tool” that he hopes will “draw people closer to God, whether they’re already believers or not.” So is this new distribution experiment a push to reach an underserved audience, or will evangelicals see Facing the Giants as an opening to attempt better, more expensive, and more subtly effective film ministries? While distributors focused on the most hospitable markets, Facing the Giants is showing in more than 400 theaters nationwide, “including the Bay Area,” as the St. Petersburg, Florida Times pointedly mentions. In its first weekend, the film was the 12th-highest grossing in the country with $1.4 million, even though other films opened on as many as eight times more screens.

As for the MPAA rating hooplah, only a few articles, including those in the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Times, pointed out the benefits of the PG rating – the publicity it drew and the increased appeal to all-important teenagers – facts even the producers willingly acknowledge.

According to the reviews, which are the only resources for those of us in the more godless regions of the country, Facing the Giants itself is an amateur, formulaic movie that will strengthen Christian hearts and roll secular eyes. But whether this is as inconsequential as it sounds is not so clear.

Evie Nagy is a graduate student in Cultural Reporting and Criticism at New York University.