An average movie

To be honest, I wasn’t really sure what to expect from this flick but, since I have a weak spot for Greg Kinnear and since it was available on Netflix, I thought I might as well check it out. Of course, with such a title, it was pretty obvious what it would turn out to be but the end-result was still rather underwhelming. Above all, the story was actually rather laughable and, in fact, it reminded me of ‘The Wonder’ which I saw recently and it was interesting how both movies dealt with similar phenomenon’s but in the exact opposite way. In this case, it seemed so obvious that the kid saw all kinds of things because of his deeply religious upbringing. Every night, when we go to sleep, we dream about the weirdest things so who knows what happens with your brain when your body is in critical condition? Another thing that bothered me was that, even though the father claimed to be skeptical, why did he keep telling everybody about the fact that his son thought he went to heaven? It felt rather manipulative and, like in ‘The Wonder’, it seemed that his parents pretty much filled the blanks to make his story more airtight. To make things worse, the kid who played Colton Burpo was really weak. At least, Greg Kinnear was, as usual, quite charismatic and he did give a solid performance here. His sermon at the end was also really good and quite inspirational, explaining how it actually didn’t matter what his son might have seen or not, what mattered is how we live our lives right now. Unfortunately, while it seemed to be quite the perfect ending, they did add this awful scene about some random Lithuanian girl who apparently had a similar experience and who was able to paint exactly the same Jesus that Colton claimed he saw. This scene actually displayed the issue with Christianity in general. Indeed, even though Christians claim that God is love and that you should love yourself and everybody around you, it seems that they always need such ridiculous paranormal stuff to convince themselves about their faith which is actually rather sad and pathetic. Anyway, to conclude, I obviously didn’t care much about this movie and I don’t think it is worth a look, except maybe if you are really into such faith-based movies.