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The Films of Randall Wallace

The Man in the Iron Mask

We Were Soldiers

Secretariat

Heaven is for Real (May 15/14)

Heaven is for Real follows Greg Kinnear's Todd Burpo, an affable father and pastor, as he's thrown for a loop after his son (Connor Corum's Colton) claims to have visited heaven, with the movie subsequently detailing Todd's ongoing struggles to accept (and convince others of) Colton's story. It's clear that Heaven is for Real fares best in its low-key yet watchable opening half hour, as filmmaker Randall Wallace effectively establishes the central character's small-town existence and his relationships with the various people in his life (including his wife, Kelly Reilly's Sonja, and his best friend, Thomas Haden Church's Jay) - with the movie's extremely mild success due in no small part to Kinnear's typically charismatic performance. (And it doesn't hurt, either, that Church manages to light up the proceedings with each and every one of his scant appearances.) The movie's shift into a seriously interminable piece of work, then, is triggered by its unreasonably uneventful midsection, as Wallace, working from a padded-out script cowritten with Christopher Parker, offers up a predictable narrative anchored by Todd's less-than-engrossing crisis of faith. It's almost extraordinarily dull stuff that's compounded by increasingly silly plot developments and a growing absence of momentum, with the static atmosphere essentially draining the movie's emotional moments of their impact - which does, in the end, confirm Heaven is for Real's place as a bottom-of-the-barrel drama that's been geared towards the lowest common denominator.

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