![fireproof the movie fireproof the movie](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/84q0SXW781c/hqdefault.jpg)
By the time the film starts, this isn't merely a dying marriage: it's an unsalvageable and irredeemably toxic one. He snarls at no provocation, glares at his wife with undisguised contempt, speaks words that drip with stated and unstated insults, takes out his frustration by beating a garbage can with a baseball bat. For anyone not on the ultra-traditional wavelength of the filmmakers, there's no parity here: Caleb is an outlandish asshole and it's hard to imagine there are all that many 21st Century viewers who might be able to see things any other way. The script, by brothers Alex and Stephen Kendrick (Alex also directs), would dearly love us to believe that both members of the marriage have contributed their share to bringing things to this point, and this is the first and most fatal of the film's dramatic miscalculations. The film concerns a married couple, the Holts: Caleb (Cameron) and Catherine (Erin Bethea), whose relationship has long since descended into a pure, living hell. And the acting and dialogue in Fireproof are terrible things indeed, though the music and camerawork, not wishing to be left out, race as fast as they can towards the bottom to join in the fun. Stilted acting and tormented dialogue do not discriminate by creed. In ways so comprehensive and destructive that I frequently lost track of the fact that it had anything to do with religion at all. Fireproof isn't a bad film because it subscribes to a particularly antiseptic strain of evangelical Christianity and I'm a bigoted atheist it's a bad film because it's a fucking bad film.
![fireproof the movie fireproof the movie](http://www.kendrickbrotherscatalogue.com/fireproof/_images/share_fireproof.jpg)
Given that Kirk Cameron, noted for the intensity of his unforgiving religious zealotry far more than his long-ago success as a child actor these days, is the star and the only apparent reason that the film was able to snag a theatrical release in the first place, this vigorously merciless interpretation of Christ's love comes as no real surprise, though the cheeriness with which it's communicated, like all of us sinners are the jerks for expecting anything better than to have God spit on us, did honestly throw me for a loop, a little.īut this is all missing the real point. And one day, you'll answer to Him for that", says this kindly fellow with a beatific calm that's really hard to square with the fact that he's flat-out telling his son to expect to go straight down to Hell. This is one of "Those" Christian-themed movies, the kind where our designated Infallible Source of Wisdom and Advice sagely observes that God forgives, basically, nothing at all: "His standards are so high, He considers hatred to be murder. But having watched Fireproof, I'm damned if I can come up with anything nice to say about it, at all.Īctually, according to Fireproof, I'm pretty much just damned.
![fireproof the movie fireproof the movie](http://www.kendrickbrotherscatalogue.com/fireproof/_images/_stills/Fireproof_Stills_09h.jpg)
Honesty forces the blogger to concede that there's not really any margin in making fun of a six-year-old evangelical Christian marriage drama that got largely smacked around by everyone who wasn't already cemented into its target audience at the time of its release and has since been remembered by pretty much nobody. Especially since there's no way I'm going to see any of the damn things in theaters. Also, with the first third of 2014 having produced such a strangely durable and high-profile run of movies specifically designed to appeal to Christian audiences - Moms' Night Out being the last of them for a little while, and apparently the least explicitly religious - it seemed like an appropriate time to look back at the film that effectively ignited the genre.
![fireproof the movie fireproof the movie](https://pacificchurch.b-cdn.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/Fireproof1.png)
This week: by no means is Moms' Night Out the highest-profile film of the weekend, but I couldn't bring myself to dig up a frat comedy. Every week this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases.