Faith of Our Fathers movie review (2015)

In Vietnam, John's dad Steven (Sean McGowan) and Wayne's dad Eddie (Scott Whyte) form a bond. Steven reads his Bible all the time and the other soldiers rib him about it. His sergeant (Stephen Baldwin) scolds Eddie for talking about death and Heaven and the afterlife to the soldiers who should be focused on staying alive. Shades of the Christian persecution complex. Eddie is cynical, but drawn to Steven's strength and peace, and wonders if he's missing out on something. To give credit where it's due, both actors do a very convincing job in their scenes, bringing forth a believable sense of the fear and disorientation that comes with combat (especially when the confused commanders seem to be setting them up to fail.) Their scenes feature the strongest proselytizing message in the film, with Steven telling Eddie about Jesus and the Bible, but the actors "bring it" in a sincere and open way. Again, it's not the message that is the problem, ultimately. It's how it's delivered.  

The wacky buddy road movie sections are strained and false, featuring many gigantic closeups of the men in the car behaving and reacting in broad ways to one another, and green-screen roads stretching out through the rear window (with a couple of scenes showing what is obviously the same stretch of road). Along the way, they have adventures, they pick up hitchhikers, get into fights with rednecks and accidentally buy a stolen car. Meanwhile, nag-Cynthia puts in increasingly threatening calls to John about leaving her, even though she was the one who suggested he find Wayne in the first place. 

Many great films have explored Christian themes. There were the Biblical epics like D.W. Griffith's "Intolerance," or "Ben Hur" and "The Ten Commandments." More recently, there was the smash-hit of Mel Gibson's visceral "The Passion of the Christ." These films brought forward an explicit Christian message and did so with panache and scope, not to mention artistic seriousness. There is no excuse for a film with Christian themes to slack off artistically, considering those examples. More recently, there was "Calvary," with its story of redemption and sin in one small Irish town, or last year's Oscar-winning foreign film "Ida," which took issues of faith and devotion seriously, backdropped by ghosts of the Holocaust. Early this year came "Against the Sun," a true story about three WWII pilots stranded in a life-raft in the Pacific. It had a Christian message about strong faith in difficult times, and it was a well-done film. "Selma" showed how the faith of the civil rights leaders helped them stay strong in dangerous times, with African-American churches calling on their long history of protest and resistance. "Selma" did not condescend to the faithful, belittle them, or mock them. These are all serious films. But the lightweight Christian films, films like "Kirk Cameron Saves Christmas," or last year's dreadful "The Identical," or "Faith of Our Fathers", prioritize the message in ways that are amateurish and obvious. 

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