God may not be dead, but this movie sure is. First off, I didn’t even realize that a movie like this could even be remotely popular. When I sat down in the theater, I was shocked to see not one, not five, but all the rows fill up. The movie markets itself as a comedy, more directly targeted towards Christian audiences, (for obvious reasons), and it couldn’t have been more appropriate.


Comedies nowadays are incredibly popular, and rightfully so; people love to laugh and feel good, and in today’s world with all the unhappiness and bad things going on, laughter and joy is exactly what the public needs, and good comedies deliver. Note the word good. Good comedies (and this is all subjective, humor is different for everyone) are Austin Powers, The Hangover, Anchorman; movies with really effective and on-point comedy and a decent, if off-the-wall, plot. Since comedy is subjective, everyone’s favorite comedy or what they find funny will be different for every movie; however, the comedy in God’s Not Dead comes from how bad it is.


In case you don’t know, God’s Not Dead is a movie about a freshman in college who is a Christian, Josh Wheaton, who takes on his Psychology professor’s challenge to prove that God’s not dead; hence the title.


God’s Not Dead, from a purely objective standpoint, is a horrible movie. Excusing all of its religious under (or over) tones; almost all of the characters are just stereotypes or caricatures of who they’re trying to represent. The whole movie is so predictable to the point that you could improv it after the first ten minutes and still be accurate, there are way too many characters that get introduced just to be thrown away not five minutes later, and the plot goes all over the place because the movie has decided to have six main characters. Not protagonists mind you, main characters. Characters who have different stories that either very loosely connect back to the main plot, or are literally useless characters that offer nothing to the main story.


Multiple protagonists can work really well, especially in comedy where more than one person means you can have a lot more jokes and situations therefore more laughter and a better comedy. We see multiple protagonists work extremely effectively in comedies such as Dumb & Dumber, Ghostbusters, Men in Black and the myriad of other classics. However, when your story focuses on one person for only twenty minutes before jumping abruptly to the next, nobody can laugh at the jokes or scenes since they fly by at lightning speeds.


A quick spoiler alert just in case anyone legitimately wants to see this trainwreck and be engulfed in its rich stor(ies)y. One of the characters (who by this point we’ve literally only seen fifteen minutes of) gets the cancer bomb dropped on her by her doctor. Why should we care? What has she offered the the story that we should care about this character? In fact, I’ll tell you. By the end of the movie she hasn’t done anything to the main story line of Josh and his school. I wish I was exaggerating. Literally nothing she does ties back in. So, there’s the movie’s first wasted character out of the main six.


The next main character is a Muslim girl whose father is very traditional in his religious ways. The thing is, she’s a Christian and doesn’t want her father to find out. Near the end of the movie though, he finds out and kicks her out the home much to her dismay. Now this has the potential of being a really good dramatic arc about accepting who you are and finding your own path through life. However, this being God’s Not Dead, her story skips around all over the place allowing the audience no time to make a connection. With all the other stories going on, hers feels like it was just really rushed as though she was just there to say, “You don’t have to follow what you don’t want as long as you accept Jesus.” She’s a walking conversion ad with no subtlety in its message. I felt like I was being beaten by Jesus himself with his own cross.


Moving on, the next character is a Chinese guy in Josh’s class. Let’s move on to the next character, because that’s exactly what the movie does. We get six scenes with him and they’re all under five minutes long, yet he’s supposed to be a major character in the story. I don’t even know if I would classify him as a “main character”. Christ, Willie from Duck Dynasty makes a cameo and I’m pretty sure that even he gets more screen time than this guy. There’s nothing more to say since there aren’t any scenes that he does anything in aside from talk with his father.


Now we move onto our antagonist, Josh’s atheist professor, Professor Radisson. He asks the students to write down on a piece of paper “God is dead” with their signature so the class can skip part of the school year discussing god and get a passing grade. Josh refuses to do so because of his faith and thus starts the movie’s main story. The movie’s main message is that the university system tries to silence believers and the professor is the gateway for that message. The movie makes no attempt at subtlety in the slightest. Scott Foundas of Variety magazine said it best, the message is “as subtle as a stack of Bibles falling on your head.” Throughout the story the professor is a really interesting character just because of how much of a jerk he is and how far he will go to make Josh accept defeat (albeit, still a one dimensional stereotype); the movie on the other hand decides it wants to make the bad guy a good guy and at the end of the movie, the professor gets hit by a car and starts dying. A pastor goes to help him, but since it’s apparent that he’s done for, the pastor converts him. Deathbed conversions, ladies and gents, that’s how they “redeem” the bad guy...


None of the movie’s dramatic moments work. It builds up something that can be really good; the Muslim girl’s story, or the woman who got cancer, or even the professor’s death, but it just never delivers on them. There’s no backing behind any of the emotional scenes, the characters are too bland to care about, the movie’s pacing is so bad that sometimes a previous scene has no weight in the next fifteen minutes so why bother, and it just feels way too long at an hour and fifty-three minute. Now after panning the movie so much, let’s take a look at the movie’s few, (and far between), good aspects.
There are a couple of strong characters in the movie. The movie’s hero, Josh, is one of them. He gets the most screen time and thus, the audience can actually make a connection with him. He’s a guy who’s fighting for something he believes in, and most people can relate to that. He risks quite a lot because he believes so much in his faith, which is actually really admirable; not many people will stand up so adamantly for their beliefs when a much easier option stands infront of them. However, he falls to the same problem that the majority of the film’s characters fall to in that he is not a dynamic character; he’s a stereotype of believers with no real change over the story. He has a goal and he does it, short, simple, boring. If the movie would’ve made him lose the argument that would’ve been at least some sort of outside conflict, or if he started to lose his faith over the course of the movie and had actual problems in dealing with whether or not he could still believe, that would’ve been a very interesting movie to watch. But no, we get a movie that is not here to tell a good tale, but to spread the message of faith and to strengthen the belief of followers. What fun.


Getting back onto the good aspects, there was actually another character in the movie that was pretty good, two in fact! Pastor, Dave, and his friend from Africa, Reverend Jude. The movie occasionally cuts to them and they’re only doing one thing throughout the movie: trying to get their car started to go on vacation. Now, it sounds like that would be really boring and pointless, but they are actually pretty funny and solid characters. They’re still one dimensional like the rest of the characters, but fun to watch. The pastor and the reverend spend their time trying to get their car to work, but it keeps failing whenever they try. I actually don't have any qualms about this part of the movie; it's predictable and cheesy, but it's a fun kind of cheese.


God's Not Dead is just a mess. God awful, if you will. A story more all over the place than a kindergartener's coloring book, stereotypical and just plain bland characters, pacing that’s too fast for you to care and yet too long that you want to stick around, and to top it all off at the end of the movie it tells you to annoy all your friends by texting them "God's not dead". If they would’ve made it to where Josh started to lose his faith over the issue or if he lost at the end with only a couple people in class agreeing with him or just something interesting! God’s not dead, but my brain cells sure are.