surprisingly good

Of course, with any comedy you're going to get a big range of opinions, from "worst movie ever" to "I laughed every time a character did anything." But IMHO, this was a good, at times very good, film. Surprisingly so, actually, given the unfortunate tendency for "Christian" productions to act as if questions of quality are too secular or antireligious to worry about. (Some of you may have noticed there is at least some effort to move away from that by some filmmakers in the past several years, thankfully.)

If you see red at any depiction of a character talking about God or going to church (as tens of millions of people do in this country, although you'd hardly know it from almost any mainstream film), you'll hate this movie. Don't even bother. But if you don't have that particular ideological prejudice, you might be surprised at how well the film works. Especially if you're a parent of multiple children, and especially especially if you've actually taken care of them.

Don't let the user-review number fool you; it includes quite a few 1s and 2s that are going to get tacked on to any film that has any such positive depictions of characters who believe in God, go to church once in a while, mention (gasp!) the name of Jesus Christ outside of profanity, etc. IMHO, this film is at least as good as (and I think better than) most of what passes for comedy now among mainstream releases, and it probably did about as good a job as you can do in being unapologetic about the religious connections of the characters while not beating the audience over the head didactically with it. Or at least much less so than in other "Christian" releases.

There are two main weak points. One is the typical zany-wackiness that goes beyond normal hyperbolic comedy and into "total loss of control, nobody would actually do this" territory (a death knell for TV sitcoms, including -- ironically -- Everybody Loves Raymond, on which Patty Heaton, the pastor's wife here, starred). Mercifully, there's less of it than in many Hollywood releases, and it's limited mostly to the scene (spoiler alert) at the police station.

Secondly, there was a little too much neat wrap-up kinda stuff at the end (sort of a "here are the lessons I learned" thing), and I wish the writers had taken another look at that and had redone it.

Both of these relatively minor complaints illustrate what I've said for a long time about these "Christian" efforts that are still trying to find legitimacy in a broader audience: What they really need, I think, is an absolutely merciless scriptwriter and editor. You just have to be able to go back into scenes like this and realize they're not working, and you have to be really diligent to get every false note out of the film that you possibly can, for the same reason that a stand-up comic walks a bridge that can break at any time, and once it's broken, you don't get the audience back.

It seems evident to me that more of this kind of serious effort was made in this film than in other recent Christian films. I just wish they'd caught it all, but they got close, and they did better than most of the mainstream comedies I've seen in the past few years.

Again, these are relatively minor flaws in a film that I really thought worked very well overall, quite a bit of very good comedy writing and acting, and for me, way more than the usual number of laugh-out-loud moments, although I guess people raised on Farrelly brothers and Apatow will have trouble connecting, as they would with a lot of other styles of film comedy from previous eras that don't depend on a constant stream of profanity, gross-out, and junior-high sex humor put in adult terms. I thought this film worked mostly very well, and I thought it was probably the best movie bridge I've seen yet to an audience outside the church crowd.

As for the more general question of the instantly hostile reaction to "Christian" films (and "Christian" art and literature more generally -- see Frank Schaffer et al.) by a certain subset of the population, IMHO at least some percentage of this may be due to the fact that far too often, the people producing it seem satisfied with substandard levels of quality and storylines that really aren't made for anybody who doesn't already believe what the filmmakers believe. In other words, they play well in churches, but not so well out of churches. (For what it's worth, I do think this particular film has the potential to play well outside churches.)

This same production company has put out several other recent films, as you may know. One of them, Courageous, is a well-meaning film about some worthwhile subject matter, and it has some good moments -- my wife and kids love it -- but from the perspective of cold-eyed film criticism (not from the perspective of church people inclined to wave off all legitimate criticism), it really does sabotage itself at some points, and it does matter that it does this.

Just one example: In Courageous, the lead actor (who plays a sheriff's deputy) ends up speaking in church at the end, and to anybody who's been around evangelical churches, it is completely obvious that this guy is a preacher by trade. Watch and listen to the way the voice rises and falls, how he lifts his heels off the floor and rises slightly at the ends of phrases, how the words are put together in a certain preacherly way, etc. -- not like the words that would've been written by a deputy and spoken either nervously or flatly, by somebody not used to public speaking in front of that many people.

That sort of thing really undermines what you're trying to do in a film like Courageous. I mean, it's just deadly. Like, "Oh, that guy was a preacher all along. An amateur actor. This whole story was just a Trojan horse to get us to swallow the message at the end." I'm telling you, people outside the church really get irritated by that sort of thing. I hope the production company got some very direct feedback on that point. You just can't have that kind of false note in a film where people are looking closely at what Christians are doing, artwise. In fact, that whole Trojan-horse thing is, I think, a very large reason for the lack of quality in so many "Christian" or specifically religious efforts (I don't think they're much better if they're Islamic or Buddhist or Baha'i films). As long as the filmmakers -- or songwriters, or whatever is appropriate to the art form -- see the art as merely a "vehicle" for a very specific "message," it's always going to cut out a lot of people, and those who really need the "message" most of all. There has to be some respect for the art, as well as a less simplistic and less didactic message. I mean, it's okay to have messages in films. There are always, or nearly always, multiple messages in any film. But when you get this view of the art form as just a vessel, and of the "content" as something specifically didactic and evangelical -- immediately evangelical, as in, we're trying to wrap this up by the end of the movie, so we're gonna come at you with it directly so you don't miss it -- you end up with bad or at least mediocre art.

Now, in Moms' Night Out, they actually give that real-life preacher the role of a pastor, and it's not a huge part. Good for them. Much better decision. It's part of a whole picture that indicates the people behind this film took a definite step toward making a worthwhile film, rather than just a Trojan horse for a message.

I actually wonder how much the influence of Patty Heaton (who was also one of the executive producers) made this film a cut or two above the usual "Christian" fare, which I think it clearly is. This movie seems to have been made under the hand of somebody who understood what a more professional effort actually is.

Incidentally, I think in the long run there's going to be a huge market for this sort of thing. There will always be tens of millions of people in this country, and in quite a few other countries as well, who would like to be able to watch a movie with their kids without being subjected to yet another dreary, loud, screamy, snarky, oh-so-clever CGI-fest with the occasional tiresome poopoo-caca humor (for edginess or naughtiness, I guess...something). If a label is funded well, and that label gains a reputation for being trustable so that parents to whom this sort of thing matters (I'm one of them) know they can watch it without the usual endless calculations of whether there are too many beheadings or shootings or naked body parts (is a brief flash of breast okay? maybe in the bath? maybe for the 16-year-old but not for the 12-year-old? and so forth) or profanity (is one f-word too much in an otherwise worthwhile film? how about five? 25? how can you do a film about gangsters without profanity? etc.), there will be a developing market for it, I absolutely guarantee it.