Dreadfully Boring

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

The plot isn't so bad, but the pace of storytelling is too slow which makes people bored. Certain moments are so obvious and unnecessary for the main plot. I would've fast-forwarded those moments if it was an online streaming. The ending looks like implying a sequel, not sure if this movie will get one

So glad I watched this movie!!! I love movies that bring out the positive emotions. The acting was good, especially Brian Bosworth. I loved that the movie shows that everyone is redeemable, everyone is welcome to the Christian faith. I especially loved that this movie was not ashamed to use the name of Jesus. Living in a society that regularly ridicules believers can be difficult and taxing. This movie was spot on, and exactly what I needed

There is nothing wrong about showing how people care about other people. Or how people find their way out of a life of crime or find hope. Sure not. But what this film mainly tries is telling me: if you want to be a good person, you have to believe what we believe. And that's just nonsense. Being a good person has nothing to do with religion and little with believe. Just like that you can show in a movie in the same way how damaging and diabolic it is to believe in god or Jesus or anything, because believers can create a lot of hatred, intolerance, ignorance, abuse, even war – by the way I never heard of nonbelievers starting a war over their non-believe. In fact, trying to force a certain believe on others, like the film does, that's already a sin. Jesus stands for tolerance. This movie is just propaganda for the contrary.

This movie provokes a comparison with "God is (not) dead" (GIND) which arguably had a similar message. However, while GIND tried to convince us intellectually that faith is good, Do You Believe? (DYB) targets our emotions, which makes much more sense. You cannot win the argument for god intellectually, given that there is neither measurable evidence nor logical support for a deity. Philosophers have tried for centuries and failed.Unfortunately DYB uses one trick GIND already used before: in both movies the non-believers were depicted as cold, rational, and dead hearted. (let's face it, the non-believer in GIND was a a real asshole). This is not only unrealistic but quite unfair, not the least because the non-believers hardly had a say.I wonder whether this movie represents Christians realistically: by and large, they were a sorry lot. Either homeless, ex-criminals, cash-strapped, or low-middle class folks who really needed some divine help to make ends meet. Those who were better off were an older couple who lost their child, or a pastor and his wife who suffered from infertility. As a non-religious person I constantly thought "yeah, please help them, god, they really need a hand!". Sure enough, some of the characters were suicidal. While all this misery is obviously not quite true for the majority of American Christians it certainly reflects the state of religious people on a global scale: the more miserable people's lives are, the more religious they are. Not surprisingly, the two secular protagonists were a lawyer and a doctor, well-off educated folks who do not depend on their religion to solve their rather mundane problems.Believers will like that the independent histories of a dozen people have all their stories joined in the grand finale, almost magically as if the strings had been pulled by god himself. There is even a happy ending, with the cancer patient magically cured, the childless couple ending up with a baby girl, and the suicidal singles finding each other. But I always wonder why a god can't do his magic without killing a bunch of innocent bystanders along the way. For an almighty, merciful god this would only require a click of his fingers. But as believers have known all along — subtle is the Lord…!PS: the actors did a great job. All of them were truly credible even if the screenplay had too many quirks for my taste.

You don't have to be a Christian or, indeed, a believer of any kind to enjoy movies (or books, or plays) that have Christian themes, or that clearly promote a message. Such themes are very subtly played out in Gabriel Axel's 'Babette's Feast,' less subtly in the Narnia stories and Lord of the Rings, and rather blatantly in, for example, Ben Hur, to give only a few examples. All these have in common that they tell engaging stories in either dramatic settings, or with vivid, engaging characters, or both.'Do you believe?' has insipid, cardboard-cutout characters and no genuine drama whatever. I can't trash it completely, because it's decently acted with competent cinematography -- a slick package, in fact. So slick, in fact, as to be suspicious. This is a movie that is clearly designed to push a product, and any artistic or dramatic interest it might raise is clearly a device, directed toward that end.Although the movie is frequently described as "Christian," in reality it promotes a particular kind of US, affluent, protestant Christianity. One of the characters is a tame pastor whose role is merely to expound the doctrine of substitutionary atonement and keep everybody on message. I suspect that if you were, say, a Catholic, or Eastern Orthodox, that message would grate on you almost as much as it would on an atheist.It wouldn't be so bad if the message were not delivered in such a plodding, heavy-handed manner. All the Christian Characters are shown as self-sacrificing, noble, and charitable; everybody else as in some way defective. The non-Christians exist solely to act as foils to the Christians, and highlight their Godly virtues.I know from personal experience that most Christians are as prone to be conflicted and self-interested as anybody else, even if they aspire to higher ideals. But there's little sense of that aspiration in the movie -- even the putative "bad guys" are just good guys who have fallen in bad company, and just need a little nudge from the Big G to become fully-fledged saints. There's no sense that anybody struggles with his or her faith, or is put into real danger by it. The biggest risk that any character in the movie faces for standing up for his principles is to lose his job. Big deal -- it's not example martyrdom, is it? If you are already a Christian -- in particular, a protestant evangelical Christian -- then I guess this movie might give you a warm fuzzy. Anybody else, anybody who can look beyond the slick facade and see the not-very-subtle manipulation, will wish we hadn't stopped throwing Christians to the lions.