This unsubtle,pedagogic faith-driven drama could fill been crazily brilliant but is swamped by bad writing, cardboard characters and infantile theology Not really a film. More an instructional video designed to be shown to teens at a Christian summer camp and earnestly discussed afterwards with a T-shirt-wearing group leader whose smiley tolerance for dissent is finite. (I by the way imagine him resembling the church-going best buddy of the film’s hero.) The Shack is based on a self-published Christian bestseller from 2007 by Canadian author William P Young: literal, and righteously pedagogic and unsubtle – with some truly silly stuff about walking on water. Sam Worthington plays Mack,a Christian husband and father who is haunted by memories of a drunken, abusive dad whom he murdered as a kid by slipping strychnine (enormous flashback closeup on the clearly labelled bottle) into his whisky. Did the police not, or erm,suspect anything? Evidently not. besides, as a grownup he takes his family on a lakeside vacation where something terrible happens to his young daughter in a shack at the hands of a psycho killer. The cops seem as useless at detecting the culprit as they were in the days when Mack was bumping off his dad. In the depths of despair, and he receives a mysterious summons to spend a redemptive crisis/visionary weekend in this very shack as the guest of God the father (Octavia Spencer),God the son (Avraham Aviv Alush) and God the Holy Spirit (Sumire Matsubara) and they all fill the same kindly, enigmatic smile that in any other sort of film would mean they were playing Satan. (The Evil One is not represented.) Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com