Wow! Such a good movie.

Truly Dreadful Film

I wanted to like it more than I actually did... But much of the humor totally escaped me and I walked out only mildly impressed.

It is a whirlwind of delight --- attractive actors, stunning couture, spectacular sets and outrageous parties.

It's an OK movie - not great, but OK. It's basically a version of It's a Wonderful Life, just from the other perspective. You get the same kinds of themes and all, but this time George (Ben Walker, actually) gets to leave and then sees not how rotten it would be if he hadn't lived, but how much happier he'd have been had he stayed behind.The hero of What If... can't, however, be the owner/manager of a savings & loan back at home. If he'd had the wonderful life instead of the life he actually chose, he'd be a preacher. Capra's masterpiece showed a deeply spiritual, loving, Christian way of doing business (particularly as set in opposition to the evil banker, Mr. Potter). Here we get the contrast between the preacher who is doing things just for the Lord, and the businessman doing things for the money. The morality play is absolutely clear cut, and in case you don't quite get it, there are sermons and prayers - some by cute little kids - to make sure you get the message.It also has its own Christian form of political correctness. They do have the hero (in his "what if" life) graduate from Moody Bible Institute (Baptist/revivalist, though not officially affiliated with any one denomination), but the church he serves is just "Little White Church" - no denomination, no history, no tradition, no nothing. Just the "Little White Church." This also makes it difficult to suspend disbelief and enter into the story as if these are real people whose struggles unfold before us.And so the movie comes up short.I find that in quite a bit of art - images, movies, music, books - produced by evangelicals. We can't quite trust the art. We seem afraid of not having it all nailed down so people can't misinterpret it. Instead of telling the story, we preach. Instead of singing the song, we preach. Instead of painting the picture, we preach. Instead of varied forms of art, we have sermon illustrations and most of them are pretty generic so as to be readily adaptable to whatever text you happen to be using this week.I wonder if this is not some sad legacy of the Protestant Reformation - the iconoclastic riots that destroyed statuary and stained glass and other "images" that tempted to idolatry. Are we still carrying that burden and that's why we have to surround our artistry with sermons lest we be tempted once again? I don't know, but it does seem that Catholic artists don't have the same problem, or at least not as severely.Don't get me wrong. Preaching is a form of art, too. There is certainly a place for the sermon and the sermon illustration. But a movie or a novel or a song or a picture can be just as God-glorifying without the sermon - and likely more so since it will be better art.Good art, like a good joke, is diminished if you have to explain it and if I could give any advice to young artists, it would be to let the art speak for itself. What If... can't quite bring itself to do that.

I watched but I regret it. A man who swaps one evil for another. Two forms of right-wingedness (wingedness is now a word if it wasn't before) collide. What's best, a fast money earning jerk or a jerk that makes his children go to church. It shows up the inadequacies of both capitalism and Christianity. Appalling. I ticked "spoiler alert" but nothing could spoil this film more than anyone who was involved in it. The concept isn't new but could be intriguing if given decent treatment. When I think of all the creative people in the world who don't get the funding for their ideas. It's a sad state of affairs that garbage like this is using up a place that would be better used by a test card transmission.

I can understand some folks not liking this movie...however, If you like "fantasy", and you could say "si-fi", and of course heart warming family stories, this is for you...Hot shot successful business man gets to go back for a second shot at life...All actors are endearing and play the parts well as they steal your heart.Not enough of these movies around...Like I said earlier, this is a movie for Christian believers especially...Maybe it will turn a heart of the non-believer...who knows

"It's finally a well-made Christian movie," people said. "It's a faith-based family movie that gets its messages across without hitting you with it over the head," people said. "It's the best work Kevin Sorbo has ever done," people said. Well, it isn't. Whatever "What If" may be, what it is not is certainly any of the above.And, frankly: I am hard-pressed to say what it really is and what the hell it wants (and I'm choosing my words deliberately here). What it quite possibly might be, is a vehicle to show you what excellent acting can do in order to carry along a crappy script set in scene by an uninspired director. Because although it is most definitely not the best work Kevin Sorbo has ever done (Andromeda, Hercules, Walking Tall, Avenging Angel, The Santa Suit anyone?), he does do a marvelous job here, congenially supported by Kristy Swanson and John Ratzenberger. But even the best acting can only accomplish so much.The script is a mess - and a bad mess at that. Ben Walker leaves his home town for the big city, leaving behind his fiancée (why?) and his ministry calling (one may question how strong a calling this might have been in the first place) to take someone up on an offer for a business opportunity. 15 years later he is a successful investment banker, with a talent for merciless deals and a fancy for tailor-cut suits, expensive cars and beautiful women. We get the info that he's left his girl and his calling to fend for themselves, without ever throwing a look back. How some small-town theologian mutated into an investment banker no-one really knows. What's worse: no-one even seems to ask this question ever. Instead, the movie deals in easy messages: big city, fancy cars, uptown girls, nice clothes and general cleanness = bad, ugly houses in lower middle class neighborhoods populated by badly dressed, slightly dirty people with slightly slutty teenage daughters = good.This is the enviable environment God chooses to drop Ben Walker in, after forcibly removing him from his upper class life on the fast lane. After a weird encounter with an angel masquerading as a mechanic that ends with a knock-out, he wakes up to being the longtime husband of Wendy (the girl he'd left many years before), the father of the said slutty teenage daughter (most woodenly played by the remarkably untalented Debbie Ryan) and another about 7-8-year-old, "supposed to be intoxicating sweet" one (Taylor Groothuis in an annoying cover-version of Shirley Temple) and the newly appointed pastor of a broke church and congregation. After much struggle and a lot of wise words from his very own, godly appointed personal angel, Ben Walker comes to like this new life and starts succeeding at it. Paradoxically, his success in this brave, new "white trash"-world is marked by him using the skills, talents and wisdoms he's developed in his big city, investment banking career.As a result, the most predominant message of this most inspired work of art is: make lots of money, it can solve every problem you eventually might have.At some point (somewhere midway through the dramatic finale) the creative minds behind all of this must have realized that something's not quite working out the way it should. In they threw a dying rich old man, who Ben conveniently puts back on track to God, thereby saving both "Scrooge's" and his own soul by it – for the sermon meant for the rich guy is, of course, also meant for himself, since the rich guy is nothing but a parabola of what Ben would end up as, were he to continue on the big city, big career road, blah, blah, blah… In case we didn't get that, he gets to spell it out later in a discussion with his personal angel, who chooses right this moment to inform him that God has now decided that Ben has learned his lesson and may now return back to his old life. May? No. Must!!! So presumably, the second message of What If is "after solving it all by throwing some money at the world, remember that God is a bit of a sadist who likes to toy around with the lives of mortals", in short: the kind of deity Hercules would have found worthy of some major ass-kicking.Back in his old life, Ben then quickly reforms by answering God's call: he dumps his fiancée (apparently, God told him to save himself and the world, but rich, middle-aged beauties do not qualify to be among the ones deemed worthy of such endeavor), quits his job, throws some more money and luxury goods at hospital employees and parochial helps and rejoins the simple girl with a heart of gold he'd left many years ago – who apparently didn't build up anything resembling a life in those 15 years, because after a bit of "required" struggle, she generously decides to take Ben back.Apparently, this constitutes the happy end of it.The only redeeming quality of this entire, sordidly stupid affair lies in the terrific acting of its three main actors. It is so good, it makes you laugh and cry and feel along with them, in spite of being acutely aware of how embarrassingly poorly written and told a story this is, in spite of the poor technical quality of the camera work, the crappy score, the lame jokes, the bad sound, plainly said: of the really bad work everyone not named Sorbo, Swanson or Ratzenberger delivered on this project. Sorbo, at least, got a Movietime Award out of it. He should have gotten an Oscar, just for making it through it all with his usual decency.