Tag: Gods Not Dead 2

Welcome back to another roaring year of shit film! I pride myself in looking for the worst of the worst, not just the best films. Someone has to watch the terrible movies, and it might as well be me.

As a note, I didn’t get to see everything last year. I never saw Bad Santa 2, Why Him?, Bridget Jones’s Baby, and Dead 7.

(DIS)HONORABLE MENTIONS
Not a great list. The Final Project was a small film no one saw (thankfully), The Boss was a film too many people saw, When The Bough Breaks wasn’t sexy enough for this list, and Sharknado 4 because I am fucking tired of writing about Sharknado movies.

15) The Sea of Trees

Hey I got a good idea. Let’s take a serious subject and make a serious movie about it. Let’s make it about suicide, depression, losing your loved ones, but maybe a little hope in there as well.

All of that does sound good. But The Sea of Trees turned its serious contender into a boring turd. It fits into the drama category but it suffocates the viewer with bad symbolism and a terrible plot. It is so bad that a horror film about the same place ended up better somehow.

14) The Brother’s Grimsby

Look, I’m a guy that can handle crude humor. But crude humor can still help the plot, have a point, or at least also be a bit funny. In The Brother’s Grimsby, we are given several repulsive scenes with zero payout. A film that must have been created solely for the scenes in question with the plot coming maybe in third place.

Cohen can be a great actor and he can also be infuriating. What is sad is that this isn’t the only film he stars in on this list, but the other film he is the only great part in it.

13) Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

Some book to film adaptations are so bad they make you want to stop the movie halfway through and read the book again in protest. Or at least to remind yourself that the book is decent.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is amazing in that it is not only trrrible, but just like the book, you will find yourself wanting to stop both of them early on and just go back the original source material. This movie is a tad bit better than the book in that it at least flows nicely together, where the book features the worst cut and paste jobs in modern fiction writing.

12) Nina

Nina Simone is an activist and musician who should be remembered. She did a lot for her community, her race, and for music. She was quite a character too. Unfortunately this movie will do nothing for people who know nothing about her. It will probably just turn them off to her legacy.

Thank you Netflix for releasing What Happened, Miss Simone? It is the only reason I know her. And it is the only thing you should watch about her as of right now.

11) Gods of Egypt

I cannot super hate Gods of Egypt. It is meant to be a campy movie and it definitely goes campy. But I can still be angry with how lame of a story it came up with. It is a film that looks horrible, has a dull plot, and wastes some occasionally good actors. We don’t have a lot of movies involving Egyptian mythology, which is rich and wonderfully diverse, so it is just a bit of a bigger pain when the only morsel we get in forever is just a big shiny piece of shit.

10) Meet The Blacks

Meet the Blacks is a movie no one saw and for good reason. It had little publicity, was barely in the theaters, and has one famous person attached.

But I had it go and see it because I was excited to see it. I generally like The Purge movies so a good parody with some different political angles can totally work. But this film doesn’t work. It isn’t funny. It is argument after argument. It is barely coherent. And I am the one person who saw it who probably felt disappointed as everyone else besides me knew it would suck.

9) God’s Not Dead 2

You know, if you had asked me in April where God’s Not Dead 2 would have landed I would have assumed in the top 3. I am as surprised as you that it is up here at 9! I even got to make a fake review of this film for an April Fool’s Day joke.

But in all honesty it is a bad movie that badly preaches to he choir. It makes bad guys out of nothing and exaggerates everything to 11. It is painful but at least it is easy to make fun of which is why I didn’t have it super low.

8) Ben-Hur

Speaking of religious films (This is technically the third on the list) Ben-Hur is probably the most sacrilegious. You know. Rebooting a masterpiece. Condensing an epic story down an hour an a half and trying to still make it coherent. Replacing well done scenes with CGI and extra action for the Millenials. And again, just shitting over one of the biggest films in cinema history for a quick buck.

I’m not against reboots. I’m against bad movies.

7) Hillary’s America: The Secret History Of The Democratic Party

Hillary’s America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party is the only documentary to make my list, a sequel to the only documentary to make any of my worst lists before this (America: Imagine The World Without Her)!

The director has taken political agenda to the extreme and decided to switch around a few arguments and lie to drive his point home. It is as much about him as it is about he a Democratic Party. The reason it isn’t lower is because it would have done nothing to change the outcome of the election. The only people who saw it who don’t criticize movies for a living are the ones who would have already whole heartedly agreed with it.

6) Knight of Cups

I don’t want to say I hate people but Terrence Malick comes close. I assume he starts shouting a movie with a specific plot in line, then he loses his notes and starts just shooting scenic shots. Later remembering the plot he adds some voice over that vaguely helps tell the story and boom. You too can make elitist filth.

I try really hard with every new film of his to have an open mind. But they are getting more and more out there he just leaves me scratching my head in wonder and resentment. Knight Of Cups is a giant shrug and a instantly forgettable.

5) Nine Lives

Finally the bottom of the bottom, with Nine Lives topping (bottoming?) most worst of the year lists.

This is a few famous people doing very little to get a paycheck. No one has their heart in it. Spacey for the most part just had to record some voice work. It is a 90s film that they tried to make 15 years too late and add nothing new to that terrible abandoned genre. Basically it is the worst film of 2016 about a cat.

4) I’m Not Ashamed

Okay here is the thing. I’m Not Ashamed film you probably hadn’t heard about. But it is really fucked up. It is about Columbine. About a girl shot during the attack and her last year or so alive. It is a religious film and a teenage drama, but the acting is bad, they make a lot of assumptions about the shooters and other students at the school, most of it is most certainly a lie, and it is basically a disgrace to exploit a real national tragedy to make a film this bad. God’s Not Dead 2 had overacting and we could laugh at it. This film will just make you angry at how terrible and unethical the whole thing is.

It is the worst religious film of 2016 and it would have also been the worst Fantast film based on how much it warps the reality of the situation, but the next film on the list took that crown.

3) Alice Through The Looking Glass

There isn’t enough space for me to truly rant about everything wrong with this film. I already did so quite well in my inial review of Alice Through The Looking Glass. By all means read it and let it fill you with hate.

The reason it wasn’t further down is because Cohen was actually great in this film and the only bright spot. But it is in fact the worst fantasy film of the year and should be bought up in droves just to bury in some New Mexico pit somewhere.

2) Norm of the North

Every year there is one animated film that slams itself to the terrible ground and refuses to get a leg up. Before it was Strange Magic. This year Norm of the North. And yes, both did come out in January.

Norm of the North barely has a plot. There is a rough story, but it seems to mostly get in the way of the piss and fart jokes. The animation is poor, the jokes are of the lowest quality, and nothing feels funny. I can’t actually remember a lot of the film anymore thankfully, I just do remember that my four year old turning to me to tell me it was a bad film in the theater.

1) Allegiant

I did not know this would be my number one film, despite watching it in March. If you read my review, I hated it, I hated it a lot, but really, I just assumed it would be somewhere in the middle.

So what changed? What made this film rise to become the cream of the shit? Well, the fallout is one reason. Yes, we are tired of books being split up, but there has never been a break up this terrible. Allegiant has literally KILLED the Divergent movie franchise. They aren’t able to finish the story and have to switch it to a TV movie/show situation, because Allegiant was so bad.

At least the first two films had a plot that was easy enough to follow. They had a lot of holes and confusing aspects, but I got it. Part three? It lets us out in to the world and spends most of the time wasting it and not answering questions. It has situations that don’t make sense, characters not acting like real entities, a waste of talent, a waste of time. And holy fuck, it killed a franchise.

Thanks for reading! If you disagree with part of this list, let me know. If there is something I missed, let me know (but I probably saw it and reviewed it on this very site! Check out my thoughts).

And as always, I accept hate mail via the post office, email, or tweets.

If you are reading this and feel confused, don’t be. Yes, I had the nerve to post a fake review. You can read it here, and should. And I did it before. I did a fake review of Captain America: The Winter Soldier, with fake spoilers. Those were good times, before I had the ability to even see movies early.

But no, now I will really review God’s Not Dead 2. I had to pay money to see this one though. I had to go to a Thursday night screening, and thanks to soccer practice, I had to wait for the 10 pm showing. I had to watch previews and spend like $10, it was terrible.

Why? Well, I wanted to have some integrity in my fake review. If I made a fake review with just the trailer, I would have missed side plots and subtleties and you would have seen right through it. So instead I had to give myself just 3 hours of sleep that day and write a silly review for a silly joke holiday. But don’t worry. This is the real one. This one will pull out all the stops.

Yeah, you might want to wipe that grin away from your face.

GND2 takes place not only after the first film, but in the same basic location. Which turns out is Houston? In a made up high school instead of a made up college. The exploits of the first guy were heard large and wide, but Christianity was still being shunned.

Enter happy go lucky Grace (Melissa Joan Hart). Nothing gets her down except for not being able to help her students. Like Brooke (Hayley Orrantia), from an atheist family. She lost her brother six months ago and her parents (Maria Canals-Barrera, Carey Scott) seemed to have already gotten over it and are harassing her to get into a good college. So she goes to Grace outside of school to ask for help and she talks about Jesus. This is fine of course. Brooke also finds a bible in her brother’s room. He was secretly religious!

Later on at school, Grace is teaching about non violent protesters, MLK and Gandhi, and Brooke asks if it is similar to what Jesus spoke about. Non violence stuff. Sure. Why not. Brooke says yes, cites her source, and moves on. Some nameless kid apparently complains because later Grace has to meet with the school board over preaching in class! She refuses to apologize to avoid punishment, and they don’t want to fire her over it, but they decide to let the ACLU take her to court. They apparently really really want this battle.

The ACLU lawyer (Ray Wise) actually goes to Brooke’s parents to get them to be the main plantiff. Brooke is a minor so she has no say. They agree, because it might help her get into college. And now the ACLU can make an example of Grace, take her for everything she has and get a precedent about any Jesus talk in the classroom.

Also in this movie. Paul Kwo returns as a Chinese atheist turned Christian with many questions. David A.R. White is still a pastor who refuses to give his sermons to the government and serves on the jury. Benjamin A. Onyango is back, because fuck it. And Trisha LaFache is back as a reporter, with her cancer gone because she found Jesus. She doesn’t really have a purpose in this film at all.

We also have Robin Givens as the principal, Jesse Metcalfe as Grace’s lawyer who doesn’t believe either, Pat Boone as Grace’s old dad, Ernie Hudson as the judge, and Sadie Robertson as Brooke’s best friend and the niece of Trisha’s character.

Letting God be your witness sounds nice, but doesn’t help you in the court.

Fppppptbtbtbb.

What in the actual fuck. Let me first say that God’s Not Dead is the worse movie. It ends with one character homeless, abandoned by family (/beaten a little bit), but finding Jesus so its okay. A reporter getting Cancer despite finding Jesus, and the teacher losing, accepting everything, and still finding Jesus in time to get killed right away. It was a complete mess.

This film is also a complete mess, but with less death. Now, one obvious problem with this movie is that they take a normal teaching situation that in no way, anywhere, would there ever be an issue with it. That helps drive the point home I guess, because everyone watching it knows she is innocent and the trial becomes extremely ridiculous because of it. Of course we are on her side, the writers suck and are implying that this type of thing happens all the time. It almost makes every argument the movie tries to make invalid because they didn’t even try to present something plausible.

Like the first film.

They made the ACLU guy out to be some huge evil villain. He probably eats babies. He scowls and twirls his imaginary mustache when he tells the parents before the trial that they will “for once and all finally prove that GOD IS DEAD!” I had to imagine some lightning bolts in the background, it really helped.

But literally the trial isn’t about Jesus existing or not. The entire trial is a bad sham that flows in no logical way. First of all, Grace’s main defense is she did nothing wrong and wasn’t preaching in the classroom. They decide (half way through the trial) that their best defense is to prove a historical Jesus, which means she can mention Jesus in a history class. Makes sense. However, all of the uproar outside of the trial is about religion in the classroom and whether Christians can talk about Jesus in a religious way. Grace isn’t arguing she should be able to do that, she knows when it is appropriate and never suggested preaching should be in the classroom. Or mandatory school prayer. Or anything.

So guess what. She wins in the end. Not by proving the historic Jesus. But because of having a break down when her own lawyer verbally attacks her to talk about her faith. He goes super mean, making everyone feel bad and going to her side. That’s right, they don’t even try to win the trial in a good way. They do something that wouldn’t be allowed in a trial (because treating your witness as “hostile” doesn’t mean yelling and screaming a fit) and end it in the worst way. It is so damn stupid.

As a follow up, Brooke couldn’t talk to the teacher the whole time (because reasons?), and when she finally does, it is after the trial. Everyone is gone after the verdict, but she says no, go spread the word. Somehow Brooke gets out of the courthouse first, before eager reporters and everything, to scream out that “GOD’S NOT DEAD!” to hundreds of Christian supporters for a big party. They were there, silently protesting while atheist people yelled and called names the whole time. Of course, the trial didn’t conclude anything about the legitimacy of religion.

And if the religious people say it was a win for religions, then they missed the point of Grace’s defense and the fact that she did nothing wrong. So they are pretty hypocritical. Celebrating in that way seems to imply that Grace did preach in class and it is now allowed. It is all nonsensical.

I need another picture in here. My bad.

I think that is all I needed to rant about the trial. So here are other annoyances.

One side plot is Paul Kwo finding his new religion difficult to grasp. He doesn’t stop going to classes or anything, he just is also Christian. So we have a scene where his dad comes right off the plane from China, still in his business suit, to yell at him and tell him he has disappointed his family and not his son anymore. Because he became Christian without changing any other aspect of his life. It is ridiculous. A few scenes later, his character decides to become a pastor, which changes his future and would then warrant maybe a father coming to yell at his son for throwing his life away. But the events are all out of order here.

Trisha LaFache’s reporter is useless here. She is a bad spiritual guide or something. But what is strange about her involves Duck Dynasty. A show and cast that are real in this film. She interacted with them in the first film. So they decide to make Brooke’s BFF her niece as well, just to fit her in. And that girl is played by Sadie Robertson, a real life member of the Duck Dynasty clan, who is even on the show. That is both awkward given her plot, and bad given it breaks the immersion having a real person in the world as an actress playing someone new.

Finally, the pastor Dave plot line is all over the place. He gets sick, is super busy, has to be on the jury, but also has to give his sermons to the government for reasons. Why? They only really have one quick scene to explain it, and it is gone in the blink of an eye. A line is uttered that “they tried it in Houston!” to explain its relevance. However, we know that this movie also takes place in Houston, so…

Anyways, Dave refuses to turn in his sermons and instead turns in a letter. After that scene, the movie forgets about it and credits roll. It was a bad way to set up a future movie, again, based on a non real issue. However we did get a post credit scene of the pastor getting arrested for not turning in sermons. Ah, there it goes. God’s Not Dead 3, eventually. Setting up their cinematic universe.

This film has a lot of issues. It brings up real historians and lies about what they said about Jesus. It attempts in no way to actually prove anything through the trial, going for cheap entertainment and to make an echo chamber instead of actually producing any meaningful change.

0 out of 4.

When God’s Not Dead came out in 2014, it was a complete joke. It was a very low budget Christian faith film. It was based on a shitty internet story, not any form of reality. It was supposed to be made and ignored but people flocked to see it so it became a wide release to get some of that sweet sweet money. It was a bad effort.

Needless to say, I and everyone else was extremely skeptical about news of a sequel. What would God’s Not Dead 2 be about? Would it be an unrelated different religious story or it would it be a direct follow up with our old main character destroying more professors? If it is a direct follow up, would it tie up any of the many loose ends of the first film?

Or would it just be a cash grab given the success of the first. The scariest option. More of the same. I shudder at the thought.

So does blank stare Sabrina.

Remember Martin (Paul Kwo), the Chinese student who had the nerve to learn about and believe in Jesus in the first film? Well he is back! So is Amy Ryan (Trisha LaFache) the liberal reporter who got the cancer, and of course Reverend Dave (David A.R. White) and Reverend Jude (Benjamin A. Onyango). But I won’t go into their back stories. Because we have a new hero.

Grace Wesley (Melissa Joan-Hart), an optimistic and great History teacher at Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. High School (that’s relevant). In particular, she teachers AP History as well. One of her students, Brooke (Hayley Orrantia), has been having a hard time after her brother died six months ago. She cannot get over it and it is affecting her grades. Her parents (Carey Scott, Maria Canals-Barrera) have gotten over it however and it is because they are atheists. She isn’t Christian, she just doesn’t know. But she talks to Grace outside of school and finds out her brother had a bible. So she starts finding out about Jesus. Which is why during a lesson on MLK and Gandhi, Brooke asks (during class!) if it was the same non-violent approach mentioned by Jesus. And Grace answers. And everyone moves on.

Nope, just kidding. A student brings it up and a complaint is made. The principal (Robin Givens) can’t do anything about it, the school board just wants an apology, but Grace refuses because she does nothing wrong. There is nothing left to do but to go to trial over it then. Where the school board can watch and make decisions from it, because the ACLU has agreed to do this case because they want precedent to make sure God cannot be in schools ever again. Their lawyer (Ray Wise) is a bad bad dude.

So Grace gets a lawyer from her union, Tom (Jesse Metcalfe), a non religious man. And they have to argue that not only was she not preaching, but she was talking about the historical Jesus (and prove he existed) which is why he should be able to be mentioned in AP History. They just have to convince a very good jury who are out for blood.

Also featuring Pat Boone as Grace’s old father, Ernie Hudson as the judge, and Sadie Robertson as Brooke’s BFF.

The face you make when people are mean butts and you just want to not be there.

Harold Cronk, you beautiful genius. You drag us in with the first film by creating a phenomenon out of nowhere, just to build a fan base. Make that sweet sweet cash. He took all that money and wanted to build something bigger out of it. So for the sequel he has better cameras. Someone who knows the word cinematograhy. And better actors. Come on, Ernie Hudson as the judge is brilliant. And having Melissa Joan Hart, a person most well known for explaining things and being a witch, and making her become religious can only be described as genius. No one cared when Kevin Sorbo was an atheist professor, because that makes sense. He used to play a damn demi-god!

Not only are the cameras and cast better, but the script is better as well. The film brings back older characters to tie up the loose ends created in the first film. We now know why the Asian guy was initially afraid of Jesus. We know what happened to the reporter who got the cancer. We know that Duck Dynasty lived on to see another day. We don’t know what happened to the Muslim girl who became homeless due to changing religion, but eh, who cares, she used to be Muslim.

Last but not least, the court room drama. Never have I bit my nails so much. The tension was high as the two lawyers battled over jury dominance. Both sides argued so well, but the Jesus side argued much better. Everything they said was 100% right and factual. Based on the film, I can only hope that a case like this really does open up in the courts, because it would be a landslide victory for religion and its role in government. Fuck, it was so good I am basically a believer now.

Gods Not Dead 2 may be the most important film of the year and will change a lot of people’s minds about faith.

4 out of 4.