Oh. My. God. This movie is so awful that making someone watch it from start to end should qualify as cruel and unusual punishment. We are not just talking an average B-film kind of bad, we are talking Mystery Science Theatre 3000 level of badness. I enjoy some Christian themed movies but this one is an insult to any serious person of faith. Some other reviewers are complaining about poor acting. While they are correct, the thing that really ruins this film is absolutely God-awful writing. Almost every line of the script (and every single line coming from the lips of the titular character) is filled with abhorrent sanctimonious pseudo-religious platitudes and nonsense. Everything that Gabriel says sounds like a grotesque idiotic caricature of genuine faith impossible to take seriously if you are over 5 years old. It does not help that the kid playing Gabriel displays all the acting skills of a wooden post. One just has to pray that he got better with age, assuming he is still in the movie business. The picture of Christian faith that the film portrays is so shallow, so impossibly sanctimonious and full of cliches and platitudes that the film would drive most viewers away from Christianity. If keeping the faith would have been as easy as having a winged boy-angel visit your town, end the multi-year draught, restore the sight of a blind girl and bring another girl who does from a drug overdose back to life, we would all be more Catholic than the Pope by now. Speaking of Catholics, I wonder where in Texas the film's writers think they can find a town where almost everybody is white, there are no hispanics and no Catholics, and everybody goes to the same protestant church. I guess all the latino, Chinese and Indian residents of the town have already been deported. When, during the climactic scene of Gabriel spending his fluffy angel-wings in the church, the service attendees almost start speaking in tongues, I almost puked. All in all, the film is more painfully atrocious than a biblical plague.
Review of I Am... Gabriel
