Stream It or Skip It?

This week on Lousy But Well-Intentioned Movies Theatre is Soul on Fire (now on Netflix), a modestly inspirational BOATS (Based On A True Story) movie with a good heart and a bad everything else. This story of overcoming adversity is a biography of John O’Leary, a St. Louis man who suffered burns on 100 percent of his body as a child, and turned that tragedy into a successful career as a motivational author and speaker. Such a character study could make for a compelling watch, but director Sean McNamara applies the same incompetence he used to make megaclunkers like Reagan and The King’s Daughter to render O’Leary’s story a thin, shoddy drama with a hooray-for-Jesus glaze on top. Recently, faith-based movies have taken a step forward, offering stronger filmmaking and dialing back on heavy-handed sermonizing, but this one unfortunately bucks that trend. 

SOUL ON FIRE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT? 

The Gist: It’s 2008. John O’Leary (Joel Courtney) sets aside his work building houses for his first speaking engagement, to a Girl Scout troop. He’s so nervous he pukes on the sidewalk before entering the building, then clams up in front of a rather small gaggle of young girls. Why would anyone want him to talk to kids? Jump back to 1987, when young John (James McCracken) was a diehard St. Louis Cardinals fan who’d strap his radio to his bike and ride around listening to legendary broadcaster Jack Buck (William H. Macy) call the games. During one such excursion he spots some kids pouring out gasoline and dropping a match on it; John decides to replicate the feat at home in the garage, but the flame travels up into the gas can and explodes. As the house burns, his big brother puts out the flames consuming his body and carries him outside, and his little sister runs in and out of the flaming house for glasses of cold water to splash on John’s face.

At the hospital, John’s parents (John Corbett and Stephanie Szostak) get awful news: “He has less than one percent chance of surviving,” is something a doctor tells them that doesn’t sound like a particularly plausible thing for a doctor to say. But the kid, wrapped head-to-toe in bandages, gets encouragement from the kind Nurse Roy (DeVon Franklin). And once Jack Buck catches wind that a big fan of his is suffering so much, he buoys John’s spirits with repeat visits to the hospital. Jack asks Nurse Roy how the boy’s doing, and the reply is, of course, “It’s the bottom of the ninth and the count is full,” but he vows to do all he can to save his life. And that he does, since the movie then jumps ahead to 1998, and John is in college, chugging beers like a madman. Scars creep up out of his collar and his hands are mangled – his fingers were so badly damaged after the fire, they had to be amputated. He’s the life of every party, and despite being fairly sloshed, he charms Beth (Masey McLain) into being a potential romantic interest.

From there, the story jumps among Young John in various stages of recovery, College John finding his way and Adult John finding his higher calling as a motivational speaker. Young John continues his friendship with Buck, who arranges a special John O’Leary day at the stadium, with John’s dad pushing him in a wheelchair around the bases; John continues piano lessons despite his damaged fingers, a lesson in perseverance. College John tries to navigate out of Beth’s friend zone by offering his body to help her prepare for a physical therapy exam; he also drinks a lot of one particular name-brand beer, a potentially problematic bit of product placement that seems to have inspired the film to softpedal what appears to be an alcoholism subplot. And Adult John overcomes his fears to start his own business as a public speaker; as he raises his own family, he has a heart-to-heart with his father, who’s managing Parkinson’s disease. You inspired yet?

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? McNamara also directed Soul Surfer, a 2011 faith-based BOATS sleeper hit starring AnnaSophia Robb as pro surfer Bethany Hamilton, who survived getting her arm bitten off by a shark (!) and wrote an inspirational book about her experiences. 

Performance Worth Watching: McLain gives the most naturalistic performance in a film that saddles too many of its characters with 14-lb. Easter hams for dialogue – or in Macy’s case, distracting hairpieces and prosthetics.  

Sex And Skin: None.

Our Take: Soul on Fire opens with an audacious string of sequences: Utterly ineffective and klutzy vomit comedy via Adult John. Shots of Macy in the broadcast booth in an obviously CGI baseball stadium with a digitally rendered microphone inserted directly in front of his mouth to cover for dubbed-over dialogue. And Young John’s tragedy, rendered woefully unconvincing with cheap CGI effects. It doesn’t get much better from there. McNamara’s direction is remarkably shoddy, likely handcuffed by a tight budget, a screenplay (by Gregory Poirier) consisting of first-draft bullet points and performances that play like first takes without rehearsal. Feel free to overlook these glaring flaws to find the good intentions and inspiring messages, but it’s a needle-in–a-haystack challenge that isn’t worth the effort.

The film takes big narrative jumps as it shorthands O’Leary’s life into a series of cliches, each a happy and/or poignant reminder of how fortunate he is to be alive and how much he should appreciate each day here on God’s green earth, with all its glorious CGI baseball diamonds and rooms full of people waiting to soak up his inspirational speeches. McNamara lays it on awful thick, deploying Journey’ “Don’t Stop Believin’” when he doesn’t want us to stop believin’, and John Fogerty’s “Centerfield” during scenes set at the ballpark that’s named after a corporation that produces one particular name-brand beer. 

And so Soul on Fire has the stifling air of a basic-cable production, and lacks the detail and polish of a feature film. It’s tonally stiff and dramatically inert, and tries so hard to be sincere, it becomes phony and sucks all the air out of the room. Characters recite generic platitudes passing as dialogue and the drama consists exclusively of broad gestures (the less said about the awkward, “touching” cornball wedding-night scene between John and Beth, the better). Somewhere in here is a thoughtful narrative about, say, O’Leary’s unusual lifelong friendship with Jack Buck, but that might require a level of specificity and focus in which this film shows no interest.

When the ups and downs of life and the intricacies and complexities of character are flattened out like this, it’s a struggle to get a sense of authentic humanity from a story about a man who remakes himself by overcoming physical challenges, psychological insecurities and possibly a drinking problem. And on top of that, the faith-based fodder is an afterthought, applied like a light glaze on the aforementioned Easter ham. It’s a cliche to say the subject of a bad biopic deserves better, but in this case, it’s absolutely true: O’Leary deserves better. 

Our Call: Soul on Fire seems to think it can coast on the inherent power of its true story, but its sub-par execution doesn’t do its subject much justice. SKIP IT.

John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.