Apr 7, 2017
There has been an explosion in Christian-themed films over the past decade since Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" made more than $600 million at the box office, proving there is an audience hungry for films about faith. One of the most successful was "God's Not Dead," which came seemingly out of nowhere to be a big hit despite often seeming preachy and heavy-handed in its storyline of a Christian college student who fights for his faith against an atheist college professor who declares that God doesn't exist.
The studio behind that film, Pureflix, is back this week with "The Case for Christ," a much more compelling and subtler film that tells the story of Lee Strobel, a top investigative reporter for the Chicago Tribune in the 1970s and '80s who was a passionate skeptic about the existence of God. When his wife Leslie, a lifelong agnostic, suddenly embraced Christianity, he convinced his editors to let him launch an investigation to disprove the Resurrection truly occurred – only to find that the evidence could point in no other direction.
The movie opens with a montage of 1970s-era home-movie clips showing Lee (Mike Vogel) and Leslie (Erika Christensen) meeting as teens and marrying at 19, ready to take on the world. Lee's doing just that at the Tribune, working to prove that a police informer named James Dixon (Renell Gibbs) shot an allegedly heroic cop.
Lee's content life nearly takes a tragic turn one night while dining out with his family, when his daughter Alison (Haley Rosenwasser) nearly chokes to death in a restaurant. A devoutly Christian nurse named Alfie (L. Scott Caldwell) saves her life, and when Leslie goes to thank her, Alfie tells her that she felt that God led her to be there that night.