The Case for Christ

Less strident than many proselytising movies, but still perched on precarious theological ground, director Jon Gunn's sincere, but uninspired adaptation of Lee Strobel's bestselling memoir primarily preaches to the converted. Having seen wife Leslie (Erika Christensen) become born again after a nurse saved their choking daughter in a restaurant, sceptical Chicago Tribune reporter Strobel (Mike Vogel) becomes distracted from the murder case he is covering as he sets out to prove that Christ never returned from the dead. Encounters with experts like a psychiatrist (Faye Dunaway) and his estranged father (Robert Forster) frustrate Strobel's bid to undermine Christianity and few will fail to guess the outcome of his endeavours. But, while Brian Bird's screenplay is strewn with cod intellectual and scientific theorising and bombastic professions of faith, Gunn captures the look and feel of the Windy City in 1980 and provides some interesting insights into the extent to which religion still shapes popular and political thinking in the United States.