God's Club

Even for being a born-again Christian, I still found this movie to be sloppily made and poorly written. The only aspects that are preventing me from giving it a one-star rating is that there a few heartwarming moments between Stephen Baldwin and his daughter and there a couple of scenes where the characters use scriptures to parallel moments that are happening in the movie. I took no issue whatosever to the movie being "preachy", because those few moments helped the film. On the other hand.... Stephen Baldwin's acting clearly has not aged well since he starred in "The Usual Suspects" 20 years prior to this move being made. He looks as if he is completely bored while the film was shot, and almost never illicits any kind of emotion. Especially notable is a scene where he punches a man for insulting his wife's death; his eyes are red and slightly teary, but his facial expressions remain completely blank. In addition to this, the movie transitions from scene to scene incredibly sloppily. Almost all of the movie's scenes end with a cut to black or a dissolve, which doesn't help seeing as how during these scenes the acting and dialogue between several cast members is so poorly done it looks like it was a student film. The cinematography is equally as terrible; the camerawork has no panning shots, no zoom-ins, nothing. Almost every shot looks as if the camera was simply set up on a tripod and the actors were required to "act" in front of it. The "villains" of this movie are simply composed of non-believers who wish for Stephen Baldwin to shut down the God's club because....well, it isn't explained very well. The most we get is that one of them thinks that teaching religion in schools should fall under the separation of church and state. This is only mentioned about three times in the movie; most of the other scenes with the "villains" say that Stephen Baldwin should stop teaching about God in their school, yet....no other reason is given. I'm fairly certain this is not how non-Christians would behave in real-life situations. Bottom line, this movie would have been a complete disaster had it not been for a few scenes, but at the same time it is simply not a good film to recommend.

Best movie ever