Redeeming Love (2022)

Directed by D. J. Caruso. Starring Abigail Cowen, Tom Lewis, Logan Marshall-Green, Eric Dane, Famke Janssen, Livi Birch, Nina Dobrev, Josh Taylor, Jamie-Lee O’Donnell, Ke-Xi Wu, Brandon Auret. [PG-13]

Absurd moralism in the Old West as the light of God instructs puritanical farmer Lewis to save a local working girl (Cowen)—practically bathed in light herself, and nicknamed “Angel”—but she’s none too trusting of his noble, virtuous intentions, having been mistreated by men all her life, including “father of lies” Dane (the devil-like figure to oppose Lewis’ Christ-like counterpart) and her actual father (Taylor), who sold her into prostitution as a child and unknowingly had sex with her years later. There’s no warmth or allure in this flashback-laden Christian allegory, the sort of hogwash that strains so hard to bring recognizable human characteristics to the unfailing love and devotion of the messiah that it transforms its righteous hero-symbol into a lump of clay with the vacant and fastidious intensity of a serial killer (or, at best, a stalker that’s “not going to be ignored, Dan”). Every contrived incident and decision hammers home its faith-based message and love-will-conquer-all secular audience hook, and the screenplay (based on a romance novel inspired by the Book of Hosea) is a witless traffic jam of applying outdated sermons to contemporary mindsets while setting the action more than a century-and-a-half in the past. Angel may keep trying to flee that creepy hubby of hers before returning and violently scrubbing herself clean in a creek because of the stink of sin, but Lewis just utters shamelessly obvious statements like, “She has free will; it has to be her choice,” and forever promises forgiveness for her misdeeds…a viewer would need the patience of a saint (or the ignorance of a sand-submerged ostrich) to do the same.

17/100