Unknown's Movie Review of War Room (2015)

Even Christians Deserve Better Than This
Unknown - wrote on 08/30/15

These small christian flicks seem to be popping up more each year. They exist only to satisfy a specific demographic, making their low budgets back and moving on to the next carbon copy version of the same schlock. There never seems to be much effort in filmmaking from any of them. Yet, the demographic eats it up because of extreme evangelistic pandering to their beliefs. All of these films are pure propaganda held together by the most flimsy, stupid writing and terrible acting. 'War Room' is no different. This was an agonizing two hour sit filled with awful drama, characters, dialogue, and poor excuses for humor. I kid you not, there is a running gag involving the mother's smelly feet. So much of this movie is absolute cringeworthy. My forehead hurt from the multitude of face-palms I gave myself. On the flip-side, the dramatic moments are unintentionally laughable. The story gives us so many illogical character interactions. No person does, or would do, any of the things seen here. This family's (completely unrealistic) tattered home life could've been easily resolved by normal means. But the mother's obnoxious 'older' friend tells her to pray in her closet to make all the troubles go away, instead of actually confronting the problem first. Of course, this all works. Devine intervention suddenly makes her horrible asshole husband do a 180 turn out of nowhere and all is better. Wait, there's still almost an hour left of this movie. Ugh... The rest is just a series of unimportant subplots being resolved in more illogical and dumb ways. It's all done in this fashion to make the narrative fit the misguided intentions of the film. A heavily mixed message about weaponizing prayer plays over a cliched montage at the very end. It left me dumbfounded and feeling uneasy at the same time. This blatant overbearing propaganda is the kind of thing that makes it's followers seem singular minded and uninviting. Though, I'd rather they at least wake up and notice the terrible filmmaking craft at play first. I can't believe the audience I sat with was really that blind to how poorly conceived this entire film is.