"The Ultimate Gift" | Another bland Christian-message film? You shouldn't have
A month ago, I wrote a lenient review of Fox Faith's recent Christian drama "The Last Sin Eater," if only because spiritually substantial movies strike me as a welcomed alternative to worthless garbage like "Norbit."
Fox Faith's latest release, "The Ultimate Gift," is equally praiseworthy for resolving a spiritual crisis with honorable values. But like most of Fox Faith's output thus far, it's blandly appealing and timidly reluctant to offend. It's an average Hallmark Hall of Fame TV movie, just "Jesus" enough to make it palatable to non-Christians. It's comforting, predictable and safe, and impossible to watch without being constantly aware of how it could be improved.
Based on the self-published best-seller by Jim Stovall, the story focuses on Jason (Drew Fuller), a fatherless trust-fund brat whose billionaire grandfather (James Garner, who claims this is his final film) has just died, leaving a video will instructing Jason to learn 12 lessons designed to change him from a male Paris Hilton to a respectable heir with a Christian approach to philanthropy. He's got a wizened lawyer (Bill Cobbs), a surrogate matriarch (Lee Meriwether) and "Little Miss Sunshine" herself — recent Oscar nominee Abigail Breslin — to help him reform.
This involves Jason being biblically stripped of all dignity and personal worth, earning a paycheck on a Texas ranch, and making a treacherous trip to Ecuador for traumatic cleansing of his soul. As the obligatory Girl with Leukemia (complete with a cute wig and sickly pallor), Breslin's angelic purpose is to hook Jason up with her saintly mom (Ali Hillis) before joining Jesus in heaven.
Excuse my sarcasm, but it's all so tidy. If "The Ultimate Gift" (from the director of Fox Faith's "One Night with the King") really wanted to embrace a powerful Christian message, it would've made Jason's ordeal truly threatening and genuinely transformative, but that doesn't happen in a movie that can't convincingly challenge the faith it supports.
Fox Faith wants it both ways: Christian values in mainstream entertainment. So far, that's resulted in likable and well-meaning but compromised movies that preach to the choir.
Jeff Shannon: j.sh@verizon.net
"The Ultimate Gift," with Drew Fuller, Abigail Breslin, Ali Hillis, James Garner, Brian Dennehy, Bill Cobbs, Lee Meriwether. Directed by Michael O. Sabjel, from a screenplay by Sabjel and Cheryl McKay, based on the novel by Jim Stovall. 117 minutes. Rated PG for mild language, brief violence. Several theaters.