The Grace Card Review: A Sunday School Lesson Visual Aid

Everyone who was in a theater this weekend to see The Grace Card did not get there either by chance or by the hand of a capitalist advertising exec, because it is showing in only about 20 theaters throughout the whole state of Texas and I never saw one commercial for it.  When I initially arrived in the theater and saw all the empty chairs, I thought I might be either alone or one of a few again, but thankfully for me the greater audience was sitting in the upper seats behind the entry partition.  I must admit that I was curious as to how they had heard of this movie.  I concluded that they saw the trailer at church because The Grace Card is a Christian movie about two Memphis police officers Mac McDonald (Michael Joiner) and Sam Wright (Michael Higgenbottom) who are thrust together and must learn to extend and receive forgiveness and grace.

Being a faithful fan of every type of cop show or movie (Matlock, In the Heat of the Night, New York Undercover, Law & Order, Law & Order: SVU, Lincoln Heights, and Brooklyn’s Finest) and being a Christian, I thought I’d get the best of both worlds.  After all, it’s rated PG-13 for violence.  Unfortunately, my prayers were not answered.  One mistake Christian movies often tend to make is making the Christians squeaky clean, perfect people.  For instance, the movie was set in Memphis.  The Christian characters had the right responses, perfect attitudes, and even articulated all of their words correctly and put the ends on all their words.  I thought, ‘Isn’t this supposed to be the South?  Where are the southern accents?  Where are the deep drawls?’  Now, don’t get me wrong.  I’m not saying every movie has to play into stereotypes, but with the country Christian soundtrack playing in the background and the country homes, giving the Christian characters deep, southern accents wouldn’t have been offensive or a stretch.  In my opinion, this is when Christian stereotypes are perpetuated.  Christians don’t always act righteously all the time.  While they should, realistically they don’t.  Maybe that was the problem.  The movie wasn’t real enough for me.  I even noticed that Sam and Mac weren’t wearing their seat belts while they were riding in their police car.  In this day and age, I listen for a click for every person who’s in the car.  Seat belts save lives, and police officers are the enforcers of that law.  Sam and Mac were breaking their own law.  While I may sound petty right now, I’m one for details.  And for a cop show in 2011, the cops need to wear seat belts lest I am completely distracted.  I’m wondering if they’re supposed to be in motion.  Where are they that they’re not required to wear seat belts?  Does their infraction of that law foreshadow that someone’s about to be injured in a car accident?  When I realize the latter is not true, I conclude this movie isn’t real.

Given that this was a contemporary movie presumably set in at least the 21^st century, if not 2010 or 2011, most viewers are watching this movie assuming the characters have been exposed to current pop culture phenomena and thus, are operating under that exposure.  As a Christian who has gone through her share of Christian leadership courses, Bible courses, church revivals & conferences, and who owns sermons and sermon notes from some of the most prolific Christian leaders in America today, Sam was not mature enough for me to be a convincing senior pastor.  One of his biggest dilemmas throughout the movie was his not being able to quit his job as a police officer and work in the church on full-time ministry.  In the first five minutes, judging by the way his co-workers responded to him, even I knew that his ministry was in the streets.  However, he struggled with this throughout the greater part of the movie and his grandfather, George Wright (Louis Gossett, Jr.), had to remind him that Jesus’ ministry was in the streets, not behind the comfort of some fortified church walls.  At this point, my attention was divided between my iPhone and the movie.

While the Bible has already told Christians how their story will end if they trust and believe in God, Christian movies don’t have to be as predictable.  When Mac shot the perpetrator in the warehouse, I knew it was his son before he removed his mask.  When the doctor announced to Mac and his wife that their son Rob (Blake McDonald) would need a kidney transplant, I knew the Mac’s partner, the “patrol pastor,” was going to be the perfect match and save Rob’s life even though Mac had exhibited racist behavior towards his neighbors, Memphis citizens he encountered while on patrol, and Sam.  Nothing surprised me in this movie.  Nothing really made me like it.  However, in an effort to accentuate the positive, if I were a Sunday school teacher who was teaching her class about forgiveness, this movie would be a great visual aid.

For a Christian movie with a black gospel choir, I had at least hoped to be able to enjoy the music during the church services.  Like most ol’ school southern churches, the lead singer/minister of the choir was the first lady, although we never got a hint that she had any musical talent or skills.  Again, in 2011, in a post-Sunday’s Best culture, I need the praise and worship leader of a predominately African-American church to bring the “joyful noise!”  Again, my prayer went unanswered.

As an English teacher and a fan of history lessons, my silver lining came in the connection between the story George told Sam about the note left in his grandfather’s old Bible from when he was a slave and the title of the movie, and how Sam taught his congregation to use it as an applicable tool for their own contemporary problems of forgiveness.  While, for me, the movie failed at everything else, at least they got this right, and for a Bible lesson, that’s the most important part.