Movie Review
Facing the Giants: miracles plus fun
John H. Adams , The Layman Online, October 17, 2006
With a miniscule production budget of $100,000 and a cast of non-paid, volunteer unknowns, Facing the Giants is not a movie for “progressives” who believe God is an absentee land-Lord. It reels off miracle after miracle, especially the improbable – but applause-provoking – conclusion to a football fantasy that is no less believable than the triumphs in secular sports films (eg., The Natural, for fiction; Hoosiers as an altered version of the 1954 Indiana state basketball championship).
The critics like to point out that the Christian life is not a guarantee of blessings in facing the Goliaths (as does “David” Childers, the movie’s field goal kicker, who, in un-reel life, is Bailey Cave, a college student preparing for the ministry). More sensible, progressives would say, the life of faith is social and political engagement to bring in a politically correct kingdom.
But this is a football movie using scrubs who spend more time reading their Bibles than lifting weights. They play, reluctantly, for the Shiloh Christian Eagles, a high school with a skein of losing seasons. Their best player has bolted for a bigger and better team so that he can ply his talents before college recruiters. They’re lethargically grimacing with the reality that they face another dreadful season. They lose their first three games and sink deeper into the slough of despond.
The Eagles’ coach Grant Taylor (Alex Kendrick, associate pastor for media at Sherwood Baptist Church in southwest Georgia) is Job. His wife longs for a child, but a medical test determines that he’s impotent. His car, with a piece of cardboard substituting for a broken window, is falling apart. He can’t afford to buy a new one. And there’s a dead varmint reeking somewhere around the house. You’ll get used to it, the wife says. He and his players have zero confidence.
He reads the Scripture – beware, viewers, aloud, hence, the reason for a PG-13 rating because of “religious proselytizing.” Thousands of fans complained. (The rating turned out to be a bonanza. Teens are likely to shun the tamer G-rated movies, but they’re flocking via church vans and otherwise to Facing the Giants.)
Taylor decides to change the game plan: Football would not be about wins and losses, but about serving Christ with heart, strength, mind and soul – on the football field, in the classroom, at home. “If we win, we praise him. If we lose, we praise him,” he declares. Soon, the players are saying the same. Echoes of Romans 5.
Kendrick is no Oscar-winner or film hunk. He’s pudgy and balding. But when he blindfolds his star defensive player and challenges the boy to give his all to Christ in the Death Crawl – creeping on two hands and two feet with another player strapped to his back – one of the many “miracles” happen. Doing a grass crawl stroke on his belly and roaring encouragement, the coach coaxes his player to negotiate an impossible 100 yards. It is metaphor for passionate Christian encouragement. In this scene, few professional thespians could have acted more convincingly than Kendrick or Jason McLeod, a student in the chaplaincy program at Georgia State University who plans to study for college ministry.
Suddenly, there’s a flurry of miracles. A revival sweeps the campus. One of Coach Taylor’s players gets converted and reconciled with his dad. The dad is so grateful that he gives the coach a new truck. The team starts winning and reaches the Georgia championship game for independent schools. The coach’s wife (really Shannon Fields, the wife of the head football coach at Sherwood Christian Academy and the bookkeeper and children’s director at her church), gets, you guessed it … Taylor finally finds and trashes the stinking rat that died under a floor board.
And the title game? It pits Shiloh and its tiny team against a powerhouse coached by the ogrish Bobby Lee Duke (a.k.a., Jim McBride, a former professional wrestler and Coca Cola plant manager who now serves as executive pastor at Sherwood Baptist Church). The deux ex machina comes when the tiny David Childers is rushed into the game to attempt a 51-yard field goal that is nearly 15 yards beyond his range. Suffice it to say, without spoiling the ending, that the boy lands awkwardly on his butt after giving his all for Jesus.
There is one character in the cast who may have beyond-Facing talent. That’s Chris Willis, who plays J.T. Hawkins, the Eagles’ special teams coach. Willis, a bald black man, has a whimsical knack for ridiculing racial stereotypes and rendering the coach out of any lapse into self-pity. In real life, Hawkins works for Frito Lay, serves as a church deacon and teaches Sunday school for teen-agers.
Another actor appeared in a cameo and performed himself perfectly: Georgia football coach Mark Richt, whose coaching style and values bear resemblance to those of the fictitious Grant Taylor, stepped in for a locker room scene in which he commends Taylor for his faith-based coaching.
The miracle continues. Written and filmed by Sherwood Baptists, who purposely sought to produce an openly Christian movie in response to Hollywood’s typically immoral fare, Facing the Giants has done well at the box office. In its second weekend, it was ninth on a per-screen average ($2,407) and 14th among all movies.
Sherwood’s cast of media evangelists are in line for a well-earned, gigantic windfall of millions of dollars to roll over into other films.
Facing the Giants is fun and challenging. It includes heavy doses of feel-goodism, but deeper truths as well. Critics will complain that it offers false expectations for success in the name of Jesus. But it takes its script from the Lord, who told his disciples, “All things are possible with God.”