I'm Not Ashamed (2016)
It might not surprise you, then, that one of my least favorite sections of Hollywood is the Christian film industry. The fact that Pureflix (the most prominent Christian independent studio of recent years) is making a sequel to God’s Not Dead makes me sick because I know that it will be just as bad as (but most likely worse than) the original and pander to its target audience in the same way. I try to give them a chance with most of their new releases, but it’s getting really hard to do so, especially after the last film of theirs I saw.
I’m Not Ashamed is one of the worst films I have ever seen. It’s very poorly acted, overly sterilized to where it cannot land its emotional punches, and is made in a way that makes it a complete waste of time. Films like this that talk about my Christian faith in such explicit ways yet are so terrible almost make me ashamed to be a film critic who is a Christian: I don’t want to completely bash a film made by people that have undoubtedly good if misguided intentions, but at the same time I need to be honest with my reviews, so I am kind of in a pickle here.
Let’s talk about acting. This is usually a mixed bag in Christian films, with the more recognizable people doing actually pretty decent work and a lot of the others doing either not quite as hot or noticeably worse. The problem is that I’m Not Ashamed has nobody with any kind of acting reputation, so there’s not a single performance that makes me want to actually watch this film at any point during its runtime. To make matters even worse, somebody in the studio’s front office decided it would be a good idea to add Sadie and Korie Robertson to the cast in some minor cameos, probably expecting something somewhat decent from them. Instead, they give some of the worst performances I’ve ever seen put to screen. It feels like they’re reading off of cue cards just behind the camera with lines that they’re seeing for the first time with no instruction as to what their character motivations are.
On top of this, I’m Not Ashamed cripples itself by not letting its content reflect its setting. This is something that a lot of Christian films do in an effort to be “family-friendly” and appropriate for kids, and I get that: a large part of the target audience here is going to be Christian families, so making the content appropriate for them is essential to getting them into the theater. However, when you make everything so crystal clean that the setting and the story elements clash with the content shown on screen, it makes the entire film feel off-kilter. There’s a lot of references in I’m Not Ashamed to Rachel’s character being involved in a not-so-Christian lifestyle, and the film tries to make her return to a more morally acceptable lifestyle its main message; however, when there’s no content to make it seem like her life really changed, that entire part of the film is lost and feels like a waste of my time.
And that brings me to the third and final criticism I’ll make of this film: there’s no tension whatsoever. I’m Not Ashamed has the unfortunate luck of 95% of its audience knowing exactly what’s going to happen at the film’s end (spoiler: Rachel dies in the Columbine school shooting), and the film does very little to address this in the way it tells her story. It’s not like the directing is completely horrible; the film just lacks any compelling reason to watch it. There are some unique devices with some narration coming directly from Rachel’s actual journals, but it feels to me like I’m Not Ashamed isn’t aware of the fact that its story is so widely known. When one of the first shots of your film establishes that it takes place at Columbine High School, you kind of know where it’s going already. It needed to be more of a mystery box, giving a new spin on one of the largest news stories of the past twenty years; instead, it tells its story in an incredibly bland way.
The fact that I’m Not Ashamed is a complete waste of time makes every other criticism I lay at it that much worse. Without a compelling reason to finish the film because of the lack of new spins before the obvious ending, every second of horrible acting and overly sterilized content becomes more excruciating than the last. If you want to put yourself through that because you want to see what Rachel Scott’s life was actually like, that’s fine by me. Just understand that you’re getting a highly cleaned-up version of her story that cripples the impact the film can make with a ton of subpar to downright terrible performances.
My recommendation: Skip it, get a time machine, and somehow prevent it from ever being made.
My grade: 4. Yes, a 4. That’s out of 100.
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