Upon first glance at the poster on the Redbox menu, it took me a mere two seconds to know what my selection for the week was.
An image of a boy holding a sword in front of what looks like a war zone peppered with giant robots stomping about with a title written in the actual Harry Potter font, complete with a lightning bolt stylized F, “The Adventures of Chris Fable” was ripe for the picking and simply too good of a find to let go of.
Little did I know the “joys” that would be revealed to me upon doing less than a minute of research, which directed me to promotions for this film, on a Christian family entertainment website. A Christian family fantasy film.
“The Adventures of Chris Fable” follows the titular character Chris, who is in search of his father who he ran away from years ago. Set potentially in some sort of post apocalypse, a church going friend gives Chris a “book with all of the answers” to assist him on his journey to find his father and return home by travelling through a land of horrible editing, awfully composed and out of place background music, and thinly veiled bible story metaphors.
Back in my high school days, I used to enjoy watching a show on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim block called “Morel Orel.” The show was a cartoon produced with stop motion animation that that parodied typical wholesome children’s entertainment designed to teach and push Christian values, such as “Davey and Goliath” or “Bibleman.” For better or worse, “The Adventures of Chris Fable” is everything that “Morel Orel” was parodying and then some. This film is nothing but a series of bible analogies, presented to be “hip” for the good Christian kiddies supposedly contributing to one larger lesson about faith that I cannot for the life of me discern.
In order to pack all of these moments into a single film, the movie forgoes a few essential elements to filmmaking such as, believable character motivation, setting establishment, decent acting, continuity and basically anything that both makes a film watchable and wasn’t pushing a religious agenda.
The blatant and sanitized religious imagery, ranging from Golgotha references, to the fork in the road, to David vs. Goliath, is impossible to miss no matter how out of the loop you are on Christian mythology. Every moment that pops up beats you over the head with its messages so hard that you can pick them out without having even touched a bible. The lack of subtlety with which they push their allegories and agenda would almost be offensively terrible if it weren’t so awkwardly and bafflingly hilarious.
I’m almost glad that the filmmakers decided to forgo subtlety in favor of delivering messages through blunt force head trauma because watching this movie stretch its material as far as it does has provided me with some of the most memorable laughs of my life time.
Between watching the film try to play off a giant three story tall robot like a Jaws-esque stealthy force of nature and the utter randomness of the seizure inducing lecture on sloth, there is not a single point in the hour and a half long running time that I was not in stitches. “The Adventures of Chris Fable” is so far away from being the profound life lesson that it desperately wants to be that to watch it try and be anything close to it is almost cute in how massive of a failure it is.
2½ Shatners out of 4
Bottom Line: I'd ramble on about how the shoddy film making of this little gem does its message a disservice but quite frankly, the trailer speaks for itself. And tells a more coherent story than the film.
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