A different way of telling a story

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Perhaps it is appropriate to make a movie in 2006 on faith and $100,000 dollars. It is entirely filmed in Georgia. It is filmed on Faith. It is consistant. It is a sports story that really is cliche, especially in this season.A coach is down on his luck and never seems to get a break. After 6 losing years he appears to be packing his bags to leave. Before season 7 even begins, hwe loses his star player to another team. Then he starts the season with 3 losses. His wife can't get a family started. His car is a rust bucket of bolts on wheels. Then something happens, he finds faith. He believes he can turn things around. He gives in and asks for God's help. Here, years before the sports media makes a huge mistake by not realizing what it means, the coach and his entire team take a knee and pray for God to help (this film recognizing that taking a knee is praying, not protesting). Suddenly, things turn around. Things occur that are truly a miracle. The coach gets a new truck. The team starts winning. Belief starts working miracles. Everything starts to change. Faith begins to prevail. The team makes the state playoffs. Then they lose in the first round. It's not over yet.The coaches wife isn't feeling right, and the team gets a reprive that only faith can provide, and rally it into a state championship. Everyone gets a chance to see the Giants lose, again, though here they are undefeated until they lose. The winner is faith. It does get a little preachy. But it brings a warm feeling to the heart. This kind of story always does.That is the reason to watch this, to root for the miracle. If there were justice and faith, always, life would be so much more. This movie proves what life can be, a miracle. It is the light on "The Other Side." https://youtu.be/vlpvWJEW3ss

One of those movies that would have been better if it wasn't as if it were done by a churchgoing skinhead. Almost every minority is in some kind of submissive role whether that's getting brutally tackled, being defeated by a white quarterback(or on the opposing team), being shown in background or in practice drills(none good enough to start), being a nearly all-white cast(1 affirmative action black actor), etc. It seemed blatant! Christianity is about converting whites, blacks, Middle Eastern, Eastern, European, Hispanic, Indians, etc. to Christianity. It's one thing to exclude them, but to go that extra mile to make them submissive is yet another. Also, it's about not doing things that are unnecessarily offensive to weaker individuals(not converts or not on your level yet). I think Paul of the bible said that. Blacks that aren't Uncle Toms or Aunt Theresas will likely be offended by this movie! Isn't a Christian trying to win their soul, too?Movie had a great message, though. God can help you through anything, if you trust him. Nothing's impossible for God! Georgia High school football coach Grant Taylor and his wife suffer greatly early on through losing football, financial difficulty, being fired, and infertility, but face it together as Christians. With urging of a Christian, he becomes more proactive with his Christian faith. His approach starts a movement within the players and the school. As Grant becomes more Christianly proactive, he gets blessing after blessing from God. It seems like everything either gets a good bit better or becomes outstandingly better. So good are these things that he is tearfully happy with almost every one! It seems when he has gotten giddy with one here comes another! Side stories: Coach light-heartedness/drama with coaches, Football player and his rich dad, a Backup kicker and his dad, Losing, the winning and playoffs, infertility, prayer, Christian talk. I don't want to spoil the movie, but it has a good bit of twists and drama.

After watching Facing the Giants for the first time this weekend, I was blown away. This movie had me on the edge of my seat and with tears in my eyes for some scenes. This movie fulfilled all of my expectations. The characters were very well thought out as well as the setting. The conflict in this movie is very easy to relate to in the real world. The plot grew as the movie went on, on leading me closer to screen to see what happens next. I also enjoyed watching a movie that was very faith-based. There were many moments of Christian fellowship that is not seen often in today's society. It is very kid friendly as well as very enjoyable to adults! This is by far a movie I would recommend to everyone, especially athletes!

Facing the Giants takes two of the most cliché genres of film and merges them together to make an overbearing and monotonously cliché film. It takes the faith-based, bleeding-heart Christian subtext and stuffs it underneath the rugged storytelling quips of a pigskin drama and, in turn, makes a film that will win over its core demographic and not many others. You'd think that a company like Sherwood Pictures - one that is predicated off of making films that bear bold, Christian ideas - would try to branch out and reach as many as possible, rather than practically confining their films to their core demographic, leaving others as outsiders.After a promising debut like Flywheel, I would've thought writer, actor, and director Alex Kendrick (who is also the associate pastor of the Sherwood Baptist Church in Albany, Georgia) would be going for something much different than something like Facing the Giants. With Flywheel, Alex and his brother Stephen, who served as the film's co-writer, the film concerned a used car salesman who, after careful contemplation and some religious involvement, found that his dishonest business practice of overcharging consumers for his automobiles was wrong and decided to "get right with God" and run and honest dealership (which is even referenced in this film by the shot of a license plate). The film portrayed the town of Albany, Georgia in a style I found close to a documentary-like format, with the whole area looking relatively unglamorous and the acting of most involved to be quite natural and believable. It wasn't a perfect film, bearing some instances of clear, rampant oversimplification, but overall, it was a strong film with a solid idea behind it. It also appeared from that film that the Kendrick brothers were going for a low-key but intimate manner of filmmaking rather than your typical, heart-on-sleeve kind of filmmaking many of these films utilize.With Facing the Giants, naturalism and low-budget photography is traded for a cloying artificiality and antiseptic niceness in shot and direction that wasn't present with the Kendrick brothers' debut. The dialog has been modified from a more subtle, less boisterous religious interference into tedious and redundant moralizing, where every line of dialog must reference God, faith, religion, or something of the sorts. If God was watching this film, I'm sure he'd get tired of the publicity and ubiquity of his own character.The film revolves around Grant Taylor (Alex Kendrick), Shiloh Christian Academy's head coach of their football team, who has beared a losing record for the past six years. When his seventh season opens with a three game losing streak, the players' fathers grow concerned about Taylor's consistent lack of authority over the players, and how yet another losing season could cost several players their scholarships and their opportunities at larger schools. Taylor is in talks to be replaced with the academy's defensive coordinator Brady Owens (Tracy Goode), who bears a more stable record than Taylor's. To rub salt in Taylor's already rough wounds, his car is breaking down, the income between his wife and himself is just a bit over $30,000 a year, and discovers that he is infertile and is unable to conceive with his long-devoted wife.Speaking of which, a great scene comes early in the film when all of this dawns on a sleep-deprived Taylor, who is sitting awake at the dinner table after hearing the players' fathers conspire to replace him and get him ousted as Shiloh's football coach. The pressure about the failing team gets to him, his finances become overwhelming, and just the thought that God has prevented him from having children makes him completely crack and break down. While Kendrick struggles a bit with the more emotional side of acting, this is a pretty somber scene that allows the audience to really look over what Taylor has to deal with before just breaking down under the crushing weight of everything. It's sad and undoubtedly relatable to many people.Taylor decides to kick his team into high-gear, coaching them with much more rigor, pushing his players to do more and achieve more than they thought they could, and play for themselves, their parents, their coaches, but most importantly, God, who they will praise whether they win or lose. Another interesting and motivating scene comes during one day's practice, where Taylor takes the team's leader, who doesn't seem to put his effort into everything he does, and makes him perform the "death crawl" (where one person gets on their hands and feet and crawls with another person on their back - the trick is their knees cannot touch the ground) to the fifty yard line of the football field. Here, Kendrick and the student (Jason McLeod) demonstrate completely invigorating acting skills that show motivation and power. For those reasons alone, the scene is made powerful and all the more intense, even if the outcome is more or less inevitable.Based on the rather basic evaluation of two key scenes in the film, you'd think I'd be praising Facing the Giants. In fact, I truly wish I was, as the Kendrick brothers are two of the most dominant and reliable forces in the independent Christian cinema movement in terms of producing films of some sort of creative and structural quality. However, those two scenes and a solid performance or two is all Facing the Giants really has. It shows inevitably troubled characters in an inevitably trying situation until they find their inevitable faith in God in an inevitably cheesy and oversimplified way that will carry them to the inevitable conclusion that will provide inevitable cheers from the film's core audience because of its routine but "inspiring" inevitability. The audience, and the Kendrick brothers, deserve so much more than something like this.Starring: Alex Kendrick, Shannen Fields, Tracy Goode, and Jason McLeod. Directed by: Alex Kendrick.