SPOILER ALERT!

As an independent filmmaker whose own new feature, Lady Magdalene’s, was made on about the same budget IMDb Pro shows Fireproof was made for –about $500K — I have closely been following the theatrical box-office success of Fireproof with gratitude.

Getting an ultra-low-budget film into theatrical distribution is a journey through Hell and Purgatory that Dante Alighieri could have written about.

To emerge into the theatrical-release paradise of wide release, an opening weekend ranking of #4 among movies costing 100 times as much to produce, and achieving tickets sales in the amount of $13,055,530 domestically in its first 12 days of release, is spectacular to the
point one must suspect a miracle.

As the hymn goes, “God moves in a mysterious way His wonders to perform.” My own faith tells me that for God to allow this movie into theatrical release and achieve the box-office success it has, He must have deep plans … because never have I seen a worse movie in my life.

It’s not that this movie is without production values or even real moments of pathos and humor. I was impressed with how much the filmmakers were able to do on such a limited budget. I know from hands-on experience how hard it is.

The directing and editing is serviceable throughout, though at a Hallmark Channel level. I understand that much of the cast has limited experience but they do as well with stiff and artificial dialogue as one could have hoped.

One of the two major action sequences in this movie really works well — a fire-crew rescuing a crashed car that’s sitting on train tracks … with the train coming. The other action sequence — a rescue from a burning house — doesn’t work as well for me simply because the budget
doesn’t allow for the fire to be more realistic. But budget effects limitations like this aren’t something an audience will care about if the storytelling captures them.

Here’s my definition of a really bad movie. It’s a movie you had all intentions of liking when you sat down. It’s a movie whose fundamental message and values you agreed with before the movie began — faithfulness to one’s word, the value of a supportive family, bravery, honesty, and openness to the possibility of self-improvement — and when the movie ends you walk out of the theater wondering how God could allow such a narrow, cultish, dogmatic, self-righteous, dumbed-down, propagandistic, smug, trite, and anti-rational presentation of one of His major religions to have been made by people who claim to love Him.

The trailer for Fireproof, and all the advertising I saw before I sat down in the theater, failed to mention that this movie is a Jack-Chick level Evangelical Christian Bible tract — complete with Bible quotes in the end credits.

I was going to say that its storytelling is about at a fifth-grade level, but that would be an insult to C.S. Lewis, whose Narnian Chronicles, with an implicit Christian message, have entertained, thrilled, and inspired children for several generations, and two of which have
now been adapted by Walden Media and Disney into movies with much of the novels’ original Christian values.

The plot resolution of Fireproof centers on its main character’s being convinced that the reason his marriage has failed is that he can’t love his wife without first accepting Jesus into his heart. This is going to be a shock to all the Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs, Drues, and even agnostics and atheists who have loving, successful marriages.
It would also be a shock to same-sex couples who have managed to love each other with binding commitments for a lifetime.

This movie has a scene in it that evoked in me the horror of book-burnings in Nazi Germany. It’s a scene where the main character literally smashes his computer because it represents to him an “addiction” to pornography. The makers of this movie do not have a clue that their movie is, itself, spiritual pornography. It reduces and degrades the gift of love to a pious submission to authority such as you would get driven into you by any cult, from Communism to Nazism to
Islamic Madrasas. It condemns as sinful the male’s God-given biological capacity for being visually stimulated by watching attractive women engaged in seduction and potentially reproductive behavior.

Fireproof does exactly what pornographic movies do: it portrays blunt behavior, without nuance, intended to produce in the audience a climax — in this case, emotional rapture.

Of course a movie this narcissistic can only preach to the choir. The box-office success of this movie does confirm one thing that the producers of this movie and I agree about: there is a vast, under-served audience out there of people who want storytelling that represents traditional values and don’t need millions of dollars worth of CGI to achieve it.

The problem with this movie is not that its values are front and center. The Dirty Harry movies did that. It’s not that it has a Christian theme. So did The Passion of the Christ, a cinematic masterpiece.

The problem with Fireproof is that it is a mawkish soap opera interlaced with literal evangelical sermons, which are offensive to many outside the filmmakers’ own specific religious denomination.

All evil in this film begins and ends with its script. Pretty much everything else about the movie does well given the Taliban-like limitations this script imposed on the movie’s cast and crew.

I am giving this movie a rating of 10 out of 10, not to be cynical or perverse, but because its box-office success renews my faith that God wants my movie to get theatrical release — and the purpose of Fireproof is to make so much money that the distributors say, “If that low-budget piece of crap can win big audiences, who knows what other movie made in the same budget range might?”

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J. Neil Schulman’s suspense comedy feature, Lady Magdalene’s, just won “Audience Choice” at the Cinema City International Film Festival at Universal Studios, the second film-festival award it’s received since it won “Best Cutting Edge Film” in February 2008 at the San Diego Black Film Festival. He’s just completed a screen adaptation of his classic libertarian novel, Alongside Night, which in 1979 portrayed an American political-economic crisis eerily similar to the one going on right now.