The growing faith-based film industry is on a quest for content: stories that will connect with audiences, or draw pre-existing ones. Mostly, the content has come in the form of true stories, from the Bible, medical miracles or visions of Jesus. There are the political fictions built on straw man arguments (the God's Not Dead franchise). Now, there's the "inspired by a country song" subgenre.
I Can Only Imagine, based on the MercyMe smash hit, was a box office hit. The film's plot chronicles the life events that inspired lead singer Bart Millard to pen the wildly popular song's lyrics. And now there's God Bless the Broken Road, directed by Harold Cronk, director of God's Not Dead and the forthcoming Unbroken: Path to Redemption. The film is based on the Rascal Flatts song "Bless the Broken Road" and combines NASCAR and the war in Afghanistan to craft a story connected to the song by the thinnest of threads.
God Bless the Broken Road
77 Cast: Lindsay Pulsipher, Andrew W. Walker, Robin Givens, Jordin Sparks, LaDainian Tomlinson, Makenzie Moss, Kim Delaney, Gary Grubbs
Director: Harold Cronk
Rating: PG, for thematic elements and some combat action
Running time: 1 hour, 51 minutes
Lindsay Pulsipher stars as Amber, a widow with a young daughter, Bree (Makenzie Moss), who loses her faith when her husband is killed in Afghanistan. Two years after his death, her house on the verge of foreclosure, she's struggling to make ends meet while waiting tables at the local diner. Amber has lost her connection with church, and with God. But she catches the eye of a handsome stranger, Cody (Andrew W. Walker), a bad boy NASCAR driver who rolls into town after a crash, forced by his coach to do some small-town community service. Naturally, he starts teaching the youths of the local church, including Bree, how to build their own go-karts, while wooing the grieving Amber.
The entire conflict is all a bit strained -- the denizens of the small town seemingly straight from the 1950s are all awfully judgmental of the young pair. Apparently Cody is a bad guy because he crashes a lot -- isn't that what they do in NASCAR? Furthermore, there isn't a shred of charity shown toward war widow Amber, who has to pawn her engagement ring to make house payments. Everyone shows terrible judgment all around, except for her friends from church (Robin Givens, Jordin Sparks) who have the good sense to show up with a ziti every now and then and find her a new home.
God Bless the Broken Road is a very strange Frankenstein's monster of a film, the story trying to combine too many elements while reverse-engineered into incorporating the title of a popular country song. It is unclear what anything in the movie has to do with Rascal Flatts or the song, except that Amber sings it at the end in her triumphant return to church, after her many come-to-Jesus moments: losing her home, her daughter running away on a go-kart and going to live with her judgmental, multi-level-marketing-shilling mother-in-law, finding out the story of her husband's death from his Army pal, a climatic NASCAR race wherein her new boyfriend drives a commemorative car decked out in pink camouflage and eagles.
What God Bless the Broken Road does have going for it is a better-than-expected performance by Pulsipher, who plays the winsome but broken woman with a deep sense of sensitivity. At the center, she holds together this hodgepodge of random story elements that otherwise don't make much sense together at all.
MovieStyle on 09/07/2018