Delayed Reaction: The Shack

Premise: After his daughter is abducted and killed, a man struggling with his faith finds himself in a remote shack hanging out with God.

 

(Club 50) I truly have no problem with faith-based movies. While I'm a godless heathen, I think there's a ton of room for stories that examine faith and religion in a favorable way. Some of my favorite shows of the last decade - Ramy, Rectify, The Jim Gaffigan Show - take faith head on and find interesting things to say about it. My issue with the faith-based movies out there is that they are so afraid to get dirty. Watching a movie like The Shack is like having a straight-A student trying to relate to someone having trouble with their grades by saying that they got a B+ once. Sure, that's not an A but barely relatable. The reason why Ramy is so interesting is all the ways that he fails to live up to his faith. On the other hand, in The Shack, Sam Worthington and his family are as vanilla as it gets. No part of them feels relatable. And, when his family goes through this horrific tragedy*, his "spiraling" is that he gets a little distant. No screaming matches with his wife. He's not hitting the bottle. His worst-case scenario is still a textbook example of grace under pressure. So, when he does meet God in the cabin, I'm subconsciously thinking "Of course a saint like him gets an audience with God. Does he really even need this extra attention?"

 

*Somehow this movie even finds a way to sanitize a child abduction.

 

This is a pretty bad movie, mostly because I couldn't find an "in". I've related to hundreds of characters who I have much less in common with than Sam Worthington in this. The kind of questions he has for God sound like a pamphlet handed out by a church at a state fair. They are the questions that people of faith think that people struggling with religion would ask. And I really hate "Christians having fun" scenes. These movies always have one of these. That's when impossibly holy characters start listening to some music and start dancing inoffensively to show that they can have a good time too. The movies all have them and I hate them. They are awkward to watch and feel so calculated. Christians aren't these mysterious creatures. Ministers/popes/Gods watch sitcoms. They play card games. Why do these movies always choose to have them dance to generic oldies in the middle of doing dishes?

 

There's some accidental comedy in the movie too. The walking on water stuff is just silly. They treat it so earnestly even though it objectively looks funny...Actually, I think I figured it out! There's an episode of Community where Jeff and Troy find a hidden trampoline on the Greendale campus. All the scenes there are kind of gauzy and self-serious as a joke. The Shack feels like those scenes but it refuses to laugh at itself at all.

 

Verdict: Strongly Don't Recommend