The multitude of problems in their marriage can be boiled down to one cause: Satan. Once the evildoer is cast out of the house in a stirring, borderline psychotic monologue delivered by Elizabeth, everything changes. God promptly interrupts Tony’s dinner with a potential mistress by giving him a stomach ache, and sends him back into his wife’s arms. Before you know it, he’s lost his well-paying job and is facing potential jail time for dirty double-dealing, but Elizabeth remains utterly unfazed. When he asks how she could possibly forgive him for his endless list of transgressions, her answer is unsettling. She insists that she’s staying in the relationship because she loves Jesus, and that it is her godly duty to forever be at his side.
You’d think this would be the end of the story, yet the Kendricks have a whole other hour to fill. So, they throw in more inspirational monologues and more contrived signs of God’s grace, all strung together in an interminable epilogue bereft of tangible conflict. In a film of otherwise bland performances, Abercrombie is the obvious stand-out, if only because of her tireless energy, yet she overdoes the old biddy routine to such an insufferable degree, there are times she resembles an unseemly hybrid of Steve Urkel and Yoda.
If there is a link between “War Room” and last year’s evangelical hit, “God’s Not Dead,” it can be found in their shared hypocrisy. “God’s Not Dead” was a call for tolerance that defended the intolerance of anti-gay Christians. “War Room” preaches that we have no call to be righteous and judge others, yet the film itself is righteous and judgmental in the extreme. If these films truly want to evangelize, then they must step outside their comfort zone—out of the closet, so to speak. They must acknowledge that life is far more complicated than the typical Sunday sermon would indicate, and that faith means more than submitting to a controlled existence ruled by fear. They must portray the full dimensionality of the material world before they can begin to explore the spiritual one.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7s7vGnqmempWnwW%2BvzqZmq52mnrK4v46wmKtloqS8rnmRaWhu