God’s Not Dead 2

If anything can be said about the majority of the recent spate of Christploitation films, it’s that they are incredibly combative, couched in contexts dripping with a (false) perception of victimization and persecution and loaded with mindless platitudes, harsh strawmen, morally dubious situations, and, worst of all, plots bogged down with useless padding, wooden acting, poor writing, and the yawniest of humor.  To put it bluntly: these movies kinda suck and succeed only at further entrenching their overly-zealous choir-audience (pun always intended) and offending anyone with a sense of either irony or reality (or both).

The original God’s Not Dead was the standard-bearer for these garbage beasts.  It was a Magnolia-style ensemble piece centered around a college student embroiled in a fanciful battle of wits with his atheist philosophy teacher on the existence of God.  It’s all pointless, the most glaring of the strawmen.  Other ancillary stories follow a Chinese exchange student learning about Jesus for the first time (and falling madly in love with him); a Muslim girl, daughter of a strict father, who studies the Bible in secret before she’s kicked out of her house when her extracurriculars are discovered; a “Liberal blogger” who finds out she has cancer and subsequently finds solace in The Lord; a douchebag businessman, the former boyfriend of the blogger; the professor’s Christian wife (said businessman’s sister…It’s All Connected!!), who has to deal with her boyfriend’s assholery; and a pair of local pastors trying in vain to go to Disney World (or some such place).  Suffice it to say, God’s glory is firmly established over all doubts, everyone of consequence converts or reaffirms his or her beliefs, the Newsboys (a Christian “rock” troupe) perform, and one of the Duck Dynasty guys comes on a large monitor and tells the audience to text everyone they know that “God’s Not Dead”.  Boom! he said the title!  *squeeeee!*

Like I said, anyone with a sense of reality or irony (or both, remember?) will either be put off or straight-up offended by this piece, either due to the communication of its message, the message itself (or both), or the shoddiness of the proceedings.  Regardless, it’s not a very good film at all.  And it made bank.  So you’d better believe the money-hungry lunatics over at Pureflix made a fucking sequel, hoss!

So the sequel, like the first, centers around an overblown premise:  In the first, a kid stubbornly refuses to write the words “God is dead” on a piece of paper and is thus thrust into the academic debate of the century.  Here in the sequel, a troubled student asks her high school history teacher a question relating Jesus to Gandhi (during a discussion of non-violence throughout history), and the teacher responds accordingly.  Of course, in the real world, no one would bat an eyelash, but here in Jackass Strawman Universe, the whole situation blows up into a lawsuit based on separation of church and state.  Why not?

There are, like in the original, a couple side plots, but not as many, and they’re all pretty pointless and boring, even though some of them include characters returning from the original (most notably the pastors, the blogger, and the Chinese kid).  It’s the main plot that deserves the most scorn.  And praise.

Y’see, there are actually some decent arguments to be made, regarding both the trial and the historical existence of Jesus.  For me, the best argument is the one constantly brought up, that the teacher did nothing wrong, merely answered a fucking question germane to the discussion at hand.  The strawman antagonists, though, brush this aside, but never really refute it.  There’s a lot of jibber-jabber that supposedly is meant to refute it, but no refutation ever really comes about.

And that’s where the scorn comes in.  Every character overreacts to everything, usually with no semblance of logic, reason, or sense of reality.  The ACLU is painted as an atheistic group hell-bent (pun always intended) on ridding the US of any hint of religion, especially Christianity (what’d I say about a persecution complex?).  Worst of all, any positivity gleaned from sensible discussions of Jesus’s historic past is ruined by smug testimonials and spotty-at-best leaps of reasoning, to say nothing of the portrayal of anyone in any level of disagreement.

The atmosphere is not quite as toxic as in the original, with fewer bouts of “Jesus or your life”, but the utter mockery of dissent and lack of self-awareness, not to mention the ever-present existence of blatant strawman bullshit, most centrally the devilish (pun always intended) ACLU prosecutor who straight-up yells his intentions to crush Christianity not only at the audience, but to the other characters as well, just makes any watch basically unbearable.  There’s not any fun to be had here (unlike with, say, Saving Christmas), only a finger wagging at your face from the screen if you don’t believe, and a boring attempt at retreading Inherit the Wind if you do believe.  There’s no room for middle ground, no room for reality, no room for actual humor or thought.  Just sit there and let the sermon pervade your being, motherfuckers!  Spare me, Pureflix, spare me.