The Shack For The Love Of All That Is Holy

I wasn’t going to review The Shack. I wasn’t even going to watch The Shack. I had almost completely forgotten that it was a thing until I found out that The Belko Experiment – a film I was actually interested in – didn’t receive distribution here and I had to find a second film to review. So, it was either this or The Great Wall, and the latter bombed so hard that it’s already out of theaters here. I saw it and it wouldn’t have made for a great review anyway. So, here we are. The Shack, a movie about a man (Sam Worthington) coming face-to-face with God (Octavia Spencer), Jesus (Aviv Alush), and the Holy Spirit (Sumire), is perhaps the dullest trip to the cinema one could make. Not the worst, but the most boring given the premise. That premise sees a man lose a daughter, get depressed, find a note from God, goes to meet God at a cabin, and then spend a significant amount of time talking to God and various forms of God about things and stuff until he’s not so sad anymore. All the while, this man – in an unconvincing and frequently broken American accent – emotes about as much as a kid does when a balloon pops. A 12-year-old kid. And it wasn’t even this kid’s balloon. It was someone else’s. There’s one scene in the movie in which Worthington has to shed a single tear – one that will be collected by a character who collects tears, because what else would one do with them? – and I’m about 90% sure that the tear was CGI. Worthington is so bad in this movie that it makes you wonder if the only reason he still gets cast is because Avatar made close to $3 billion. He’s not the reason Avatar made money, guys. Nobody even remembers that he’s in that movie! “Who was the lead of Avatar?” “Uh, the blue alien.” The only other thing that The Shack does well is that it allows its protagonist to enter a darker place than most characters in these types of films. The first scenes in the film showcase childhood abuse, and after losing his child, he becomes very depressed. And if a good actor was playing the character, we might, perhaps, even begin to care about him. We can tell that the movie wants us to, but Worthington is so bad that we just can’t. It never feels even remotely real. None of the other actors are bad, overall, but they’re also not the emotional core of the film. I know I keep going back to this well, but with re-written dialogue and a good actor in the lead, The Shack might’ve been an okay movie. As it is? It’s garbage. [rating=0.5]