Thus, Brooke’s parents are soon filing suit against Grace with the aid of Wise’s villainous lawyer, who promises them that the ensuing publicity will somehow help their daughter get into a good college if only they’ll sign on the Faustian dotted line. According to her bosses (led by Robin Givens’ mean principal), such biblical discourse violates state and federal laws governing separation of church and state. And the effect of such talk is to situate the action in a fictional world that seems at once recognizable – it is, for example, populated by humans who can speak, eat and weep – and yet so topsy-turvy as to be the stuff of science-fiction.Īgain collaborating with screenwriters Chuck Konzelman and Cary Solomon, Cronk’s tale focuses on high-school history teacher Grace ( Melissa Joan Hart), who finds herself facing the school board’s fire-and-brimstone wrath when, while lecturing about Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., student Brooke (Hayley Orrantia) asks about the similarities between those leaders and Jesus, and Grace responds by quoting scripture. The notion that Christians are an oppressed minority beset on all sides by secular “rationalist” forces (including the government, which wants Pastor Dave to hand over his sermons) is bluntly articulated throughout. White) tells a group of ministers led by Fred Dalton Thompson – are waging a genuine “war” against Christians. “God’s Not Dead 2,” though, doesn’t mean him to be a caricature, but rather a realistic emblem of the “vicious” forces that – as Pastor Dave (David A.R.
Visually demarcated by his swanky shoes, designer suit and borderline-maniacal eyes, Wise’s Pete Kane is presented as a veritable demon fit for a David Lynch film. Since he literally died for his sins at the end of that story – only after making a deathbed conversion to Christ, however! – the filmmaker’s latest turns to another anti-conservative archetype for its bad guy: an ACLU lawyer, here embodied by Ray Wise as a disbelieving shark who “hates” Christians’ beliefs, and who wants to use his newest case to “prove, once and for all, that God is dead!”
#GODS NOT DEAD 2 THE MOVIE FULL#
The franchise’s disciples will surely fill its collection plate as full as 2014’s $60-million-grossing original, but this paranoid persecution-complex fantasy is unlikely to win many converts.Ĭronk’s original installment presented Kevin Sorbo’s atheistic liberal-arts professor as the embodiment of satanic evil. Boasting a superficially new plot but preaching the exact same sermon – in the identical leaden, graceless manner – as its predecessor, Harold Cronk’s follow-up concocts a laughable crisis of faith whose resolution is a fait accompli, turning the endeavor into a torturous exercise in one-note proselytizing. The Almighty is still alive, albeit also under continuing attack, in “God’s Not Dead 2,” a sequel in which the issue of religion in schools leads to a courtroom showdown over God’s rightful place in society.