Elizabeth and Tony Jordan (Priscilla Shirer and T.C. Stallings) seemingly have it all, a beautiful daughter Danielle (Alena Pitts) and a big house. Things are not as they seem when their marriage is beginning to crumble causing them to become increasingly bitter to one another. Their fortunes begin to turn for the better when Elizabeth, a real estate agent, meets one of her newest clients, Miss Clara (Karen Abercrombie), who teaches them how to find happiness through the power of prayer.
I will say right now that I am not a religious person so everything I say from now on will be based on this. Keep in mind that this should have nothing to do with anything, at least in my opinion. If you haven’t figured it out already, this is a religious film. By that, it is a very religious film in that it just takes this idea and just runs with it. I think it took it a little too far as most of the time I felt like I was drowning. The story itself isn’t too overly original and it is something that has been done to death in film and on television. Watching this did remind me sometimes of a soap opera and also of a lifetime movie as it shares ideas and themes with those. Many moments are just oozing melodrama. What contributed to this was the cheesy acting, or overacting, by everyone appearing throughout. Also what didn’t help was the laughably bad dialogue between Elizabeth and Tony. I can see that they were trying to create some drama and friction but it just didn’t work. In order to try to break up the strong religious moments in the film, they tried to insert some comedy in a few scenes but it just didn’t work for me as I did not find any of it funny at all. The only thing I liked about this film was Karen Abercrombie’s performance as Miss Clara. I will admit that I found it a little over-the-top as the main driving force of the religious overtones of the film. She was definitely not subtle about it to say the least. Some people may find her character as a caricature, like me, but I found her entertaining and she stole every scene she was in as her character imposed herself on everyone else. Being a religious film, I will say that it probably did have a message and was probably trying to teach some lessons about things but I just couldn’t get into that because I was too busy laughing because of the reasons I mentioned above and the bad religious music. When I wasn’t laughing, I was being tortured by the cheesy acting and the sappy piano music which I guess was supposed to inspire me or something but whatever. If they toned down all the religious stuff, this film may have been better but I have a suspicion that this film exists only to pander to religious people and I guess it worked since it has made a lot of money at the box office and the audience in the theater gave it a round of applause at the end. Shame on you!
Score: 3.5/10
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The EIC of the coincidentally-named keithlovesmovies.com. A Canadian who prefers to get out of the cold and into the warmth of a movie theatre.
