Overall, I would say if you were a Christian you would probably like the message of this film however you would have to look past quite a few issues in order to appreciate it. The clunky writing, poor editing, and awkward acting make this film difficult to watch even with the good-looking visuals and addition of the wonderful Jordin Sparks.
God Bless the Broken Road is a Christian film that is based on a 1988 country song made popular by Rascal Flatts. Just think about that for a minute.
The plot follows a young mother Amber Hill after the loss of her husband in Afganistan as she tries to provide for her daughter on her own. She begins to spend more time working and less at church while her daughter enrolls in a church go-kart club headed by NASCAR racer Cody Jackson. Cody at first hates the program though he comes to love it and also finds himself getting his mind set on Amber. The two go on a date but Amber quickly decides that she is not ready for a relationship and breaks it off. After Amber can longer afford to pay rent, the relationship between her and her daughter grow increasingly distant until the daughter runs away. She is found a few hours later though she decides that she would rather live with her grandmother instead of her mother. After this Amber is driving home and stops in front of her old church and retracts her relationship with God calling up to the cross on the steeple. Though a group of her church friends find her along with one of the men who was in her husbands military unit. The man explains to her that her husband saved the mans life and sacrificed his own to do so. He gives her a cross that her husband used to wear and she then decides that God is cool again, gets her daughter back, and gives Cody a chance.
Well, I won’t lie, this movie has a lot of issues. Though we are going to open on some of the good points. First, Jordin Sparks is in this movie. Yes, the American Idol winning, Battlefield singing, generally amazing person Jordin Sparks is in this movie. I love her music and was very excited to see that she was a part of this. Her character is one of Amber’s best friends and one of the members of the church choir. Before you get your hopes up, she is featured in a choir performance scene in which she sings a solo for about 30 seconds (best thirty seconds of the movie) and unfortunately she has no more singing parts throughout the film. Interesting choice. The second good point of this movie is the way how it looks. The cinematography was done by Philip Roy and I have to say his work was pretty solid. There were many interesting shots throughout the movie, times when they could have taken the easy route with a simple shot though they instead went with a less obvious perspective or just a generally more pleasing framing. The color correction was also rather good for the day shots, the night shots didn’t turn out great though despite being a rather low budget movie you wouldn’t be able to tell from most of the shots. Especially on the Blu-Ray disc, this movie just looks good so props to the creators for that. And those are my good points.
Now for the bad points, I would like to just start off with characters in general. Usually, I like to dissect characters and talk more about what their motivations are the level of characterization present in the writing and the originality of those characters. That isn’t really something I can do for this movie. Most of the acting in this movie is equivalent to that of PSA or high school health class videos. The daughter was probably the best one, she was just about the only actor/actress that had a range to their performance. Cody Jackson was okay half of the time then the other half felt like he was trying to hard to be a cool manly guy which may be due to the writing and not by the actor’s fault. Most of the dialogue of this movie is just awkward and clunky and lacks a sense of realism. The editing isn’t the smoothest either, in many places throughout the film there are movements that are doubled due to a poor cut or sometimes editing choices will be made during conversations that distract the viewer from the dialogue. My biggest issue with this movie is probably the tone. From scene to scene the tone changes and pretty much ignores what came before it and launches into a different feeling without transition. This is something that would occasionally happen within individual scenes, not even from scene to scene.
Overall, I would say if you were a Christian you would probably like the message of this film however you would have to look past quite a few issues in order to appreciate it. The clunky writing, poor editing, and awkward acting make this film difficult to watch even with the good-looking visuals and addition of the wonderful Jordin Sparks.
