Soul Surfer (2011)

I already know that I am going to get a lot of hate for this review. Probably not as much as I did for my Happy Gilmore review, but still a lot. And here’s why. It makes me angry-no-it makes me downright furious that people would recommend movies with Christian messages just because of that fact. The last good Christian movie was…probably The Book of Eli. Isn’t that sad? The last good movie to have strong Christian messages was a rated-r dystopian action film with Denzel Washington. And Soul Surfer really isn’t much of a Christian movie. There are some Christian moments in the film, but not enough for the film to feel preachy, just enough that it is an attempt to be preachy, almost. It relieves me that the film isn’t cramming messaged down my throat, but it does feel a little off-putting. At least in a movie like Letters to God you know what messages they’re trying to send out to you. But the movie, in this aspect at least, is relieving and also off-putting. It’s a hard combination to swallow, and is one that does not take. And I blame this on the director, Sean McNamara, who has officially ended up on my ‘worst directors’ list, somewhere around Ewe Boll. And why is this? Along with the fact that no moments in the film that are good stem from direction, the man was dumb enough to direct Bratz: The Movie. And if you can go read my review of that, you will know that I hate that movie so much. But no moments in the film that are good are at the hand of Mr. McNamara. They’re all from other people, hoping to get somewhat of a good film out of this guy. The writing isn’t terrible most of the time, but the dialogue is on a scale from ‘come on!’ to ‘sort of cheesy’ But that can be forgiven. The acting isn’t terrible either, especially from the main girl, wonderful actress AnnaSophia Robb. She plays the real-life character Bethany Hamilton, who is one of the single most talented young surfers of her generation. But, she gets her arm bitten off by a shark. She survives, and uses her faith (but not really, as evident in this movie), family, and friends to overcome the tragedy and get back in the water (I swear, I didn’t steal this plot synopsis from anywhere; just talking about the plot of the film comes off like the plot of a Hallmark movie). Other characters are played by Dennis Quaid and Carrie Underwood, who really isn’t in the film a lot. There is one scene in here, where she is asking Bethany to come on a mission trip to Mexico (which, if she had been there, she wouldn’t have gotten her hand bitten off), and after she gets a ‘no’, due to the fact that Beth has to keep surfing and get better at it since she was just sponsored, you see this look on Underwood’s face, where she is basically looking like-“Okay. You don’t wanna go? You’re going to lose your arm now.” It’s kind of funny. But the film is just too melodramatic and never hits the points it’s trying to make. Soul Surfer could have been a great film. It could have been an amazing film. But it just never was.
5/10