God’s Not Dead 2

Direc­tor Harold Cronk’s soon-to-be fran­chise tries to pre­tend it exists for a reli­gious sub­set who are ques­tion­ing their faith. In actu­al­i­ty it is for the those who need the social and polit­i­cal advan­tages of their faith con­firmed to them. It is a shame that the Melis­sa Joan Hart of 20 years ago is not around to explain it all in a man­ner that we can relate to, because she – along with the entire cast – seems con­fused as to how she arrived at this point in her career.

Dia­logue is lib­er­al­ly strewn with patro­n­is­ing­ly blunt life-lessons: ​“When you’re going through some­thing real­ly hard, the teacher is always qui­et dur­ing the test.” These are dished out as answers to the mys­ter­ies of earth­ly exis­tence, and thus the film’s over-arch­ing the­sis is ham­mered home at every oppor­tu­ni­ty. Melis­sa Joan Hart is right, so God is real. Case closed.

For those brave souls who weren’t con­vert­ed by the first film, or maybe were baf­fled by its head-on approach, most of the orig­i­nal cast are back to add droplets of moral­i­ty to a sea of half-baked rhetoric. This time around they are employed to guide high school teacher, Grace (Hart), as she fights for the right to men­tion Jesus in a his­to­ry class. Her cause is picked up by the low­ly, but spir­it­ed union lawyer, Tom Endler (Jesse Met­calfe), a man whose chin-stub­ble is as del­i­cate as his manner.

He talks in gar­bled legalese, com­ing across as a zom­bie acolyte who gob­bles up any sense of cold, hard real­i­ty. The film is essen­tial­ly a court­room dra­ma, one that seems to last for the eter­ni­ty God has promised all those par­tic­i­pat­ing. This is a prob­lem. The real wait is for an illu­so­ry star wit­ness to turn up and prove the revolt­ing naysay­ers wrong.

Hart does her best to seem oppressed. She even sug­gest­ed while on the film’s pro­mo­tion­al tour that she her­self has been per­se­cut­ed for her reli­gious beliefs. Infi­dels may scoff, but what if the film’s financiers have been hand­ed enough mon­ey from the col­lec­tion plate to address every one of Richard Dawkins’ tweets with its own two-hour fea­ture? Cronk has already declared that God is not dead – twice. We know where he stands. We don’t need to hear it again. But we prob­a­bly will.