Superstar Cinema – The Resurrection of Gavin Stone

So when I  initially set out to expand our reach by exploring other places you’ll find the WWE Superstars, movies were the obvious place to start and I even got half way through writing up a review for Baywatch before stopping.  You’re going to see Baywatch, it has The Rock in it which means it will automatically earn $800,000,000 at the box office, so what’s the point?

So I went a different route and found The Resurrection of Gavin Stone in the Redbox.  As I’m sure you’re aware, because he even came to Raw to cut a promo about being in the movie, The Heartbreak Kid himself, Mr. Shawn Michaels has a role in the film as saved biker Doug.  The film was also produced by WWE Films.  Without the WWE tie in, this movie would have likely gone straight to Hallmark Channel, and that’s not necessarily to say that it’s bad, because surprisingly enough, I didn’t hate it like I expected.

The film centers on child star turned adult flameout Gavin Stone (Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s Brett Dalton) who gets arrested in his home state of Illinois and is sentenced to 200 hours of community service at a Baptist church run by Pastor Richardson (DB Sweeney – yep, that dude from The Cutting Edge is still alive) and his daughter/love interest of the film Kelly (Anjelah Johnson-Reyes who has a lengthy IMDB page but there’s not really any substance to it) , and being broke, has no choice but to move home with his estranged father (Scrub’s Janitor Neil Flynn).  While his community service is supposed to be him mopping bathrooms and whatnot, he somehow cons his way into the church stage production, ends up being cast as Jesus, and has to navigate a character he doesn’t really understand while attempting to understand his own flawed character.

I’m not wildly religious, as I’m sure you have picked up on, so the heavy (HEAVY!) religious undertones of the film didn’t really swing me in to support the film, but it also didn’t detract from me giving it a chance like so many of the films much like it in the past.  If you look past all that, it’s really just a movie about a fucked up guy that had everything, lost it all and finds something that gives him purpose.  We can all relate to that, be it Trent Reznor kicking the heroin and finding the gym or Shawn Michaels getting clean and finding Jesus, we’re all striving desperately daily to find something that makes us feel whole.  I’m never going to shit on someone if that thing is Jesus, as a deity provides billions of people globally with at least a portion of that feeling.

Shawn Michaels is only in this movie for like 5 minutes, so some part of me thinks they were convinced that putting him on the poster/redbox art and WWE having a reason to promote the film as one of their own was going to make it something more than a Hallmark movie.  It’s not, but it is a decent Hallmark movie.  I’m not adding a copy to my collection or anything, but it wasn’t a completely disappointing $1.50 Redbox rental.  So if you’re rushing out to see it because of HBK, don’t, it will disappoint you.  If you participate in one of those church groups that bought group tickets for Passion of the Christ or whatever that Jennifer Garner movie was, I am going to highly recommend it.  It’s not the complete piece of crap that the previews made it appear to be and it’s not going to win screenwriting awards or ride the merits of its uncanny cast, but if you’ve got an hour and a half to watch a movie and go in with reasonable expectations, I think you will even remotely enjoy it.

Or I’m wrong, got 2 hours of sleep because I drove to Greenville for Raw and had to be at work at 6:30 this morning.  Either way, it wasn’t terrible, and if you get really bored one rainy day and just want to watch a movie, hell, wouldn’t hurt to grab this one.

Overall Grade: C-