God's Not Dead 2

This sequel to the faith-based hit is a torturous exercise in one-note proselytizing.

The Almighty is still alive, albeit also under continuing attack, in “God’s Not Dead 2,” a sequel in which the issue of religion in schools leads to a courtroom showdown over God’s rightful place in society. Boasting a superficially new plot but preaching the exact same sermon – in the identical leaden, graceless manner – as its predecessor, Harold Cronk’s follow-up concocts a laughable crisis of faith whose resolution is a fait accompli, turning the endeavor into a torturous exercise in one-note proselytizing. The franchise’s disciples will surely fill its collection plate as full as 2014’s $60-million-grossing original, but this paranoid persecution-complex fantasy is unlikely to win many converts.
Trailer:

Cronk’s original installment presented Kevin Sorbo’s atheistic liberal-arts professor as the embodiment of satanic evil. Since he literally died for his sins at the end of that story – only after making a deathbed conversion to Christ, however! – the filmmaker’s latest turns to another anti-conservative archetype for its bad guy: an ACLU lawyer, here embodied by Ray Wise as a disbelieving shark who “hates” Christians’ beliefs, and who wants to use his newest case to “prove, once and for all, that God is dead!”

Visually demarcated by his swanky shoes, designer suit and borderline-maniacal eyes, Wise’s Pete Kane is presented as a veritable demon fit for a David Lynch film. “God’s Not Dead 2,” though, doesn’t mean him to be a caricature, but rather a realistic emblem of the “vicious” forces that – as Pastor Dave (David A.R. White) tells a group of ministers led by Fred Dalton Thompson – are waging a genuine “war” against Christians. The notion that Christians are an oppressed minority beset on all sides by secular “rationalist” forces (including the government, which wants Pastor Dave to hand over his sermons) is bluntly articulated throughout. And the effect of such talk is to situate the action in a fictional world that seems at once recognizable – it is, for example, populated by humans who can speak, eat and weep – and yet so topsy-turvy as to be the stuff of science-fiction.

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