Is it courage?

If you're good at preaching, that's what you should do. If filmmaking is your forte, make films.

This fundamental logic seems to escape the folks at Sherwood Pictures, particularly now-veteran director and star Alex Kendrick. Courageous is his latest effort, the story of four cop friends in rural Georgia (and a Mexican immigrant worker) who overcome life's plentiful obstacles through faith in Christ. The central struggle in this film is that of Christian men stepping up to lead their families in godly fashion.

A message no good Christian would argue with, myself included. Christian men do need to lead their families, and the call to do so seems particularly urgent now in our age of neglected responsibility and outright abandonment.

A message, too, that could provide the basis for an excellent film. It monumentally fails to do so here. It's not that Courageous is a bad movie; it's that it's scarcely a movie. Granted, it's a Golden Globe winner compared to Facing the Giants or Fireproof, but that's not saying a whole lot. Facing the Giants was juvenile and doctrinally suspect; Courageous is sophomoric and doctrinally ambiguous.

Running through every Sherwood Pictures production is the idea that faith in God will either straighten every path, or cut tragedy short just before things go haywire. That's not to say tragedy never occurs, just that bad things will always lead to better things. Jesus promises His followers a hard road and tribulation; Kendrick seems to counter with an affirmation of constant blue skies and the idea that bad acting will not return void as long as the actors' hearts are right.

Even more troublesome are the constant emotional appeals. Grown men cry a lot in all of these movies, and there's always a Hallmark-inspired guitar and synth business going on in the background to stir our hearts to conversion-pitch. The Gospel of Christ is not an emotional business. It convicts us of our sin, demands our repentance, and calls us to follow Him whatever the cost. I don't think Simon the Zealot was playing sappy John Tesh pieces in the background during the Sermon on the Mount.

That's not to say we should never feel emotion as part of our faith, and to give Kendrick some credit there are plenty of legitimate tears in Courageous given the often sad plot turns. But in the film's last scene, when Kendrick's character delivers a Braveheart-on-Lucado speech, it's clear that all along he's only wanted us to feel his message is right, not to know it because that's what Scripture tells us.

Scripture is often appealed to, but never quoted. That's a major lack in a movie clumsily trying to convince us that the Gospel changes everything. The Gospel does change everything, but not necessarily in the way Kendrick implies.

Which leads me to my initial complaint: Kendrick evidences mastery of a certain kind of megachurch preaching, but no evidence that he can actually make a movie. Courageous is a Southern-fried, often strangely racist, megachurch-y, sanctified version of CSI, but it's not a work of art in any sense. There's not one moment of subtelty, nowhere are the characters portrayed as anything other than stock characters, and (especially odd for a Christian movie) symbolism is never employed.

A lot of critics have simply derided the Christianity of the film's cast and crew. As a Christian, I have no desire to do that, or to appear as though I disrespect or disagree with the underlying message of the movie. What I do want to know is, why do Christians think it's OK to make bad art on behalf of Christ? This could have been a good movie; it wasn't. Does its message redeem it? Is it courage simply to preach when the chosen medium is intended for other purposes? Somehow, I don't think so.