By Peter Rizzo | Staff Writer
When I made the decision to write a review of Christian Mingle: The Movie, I thought that it was going to be a terrible movie. And then I started watching it and ten minutes in, I knew it was going to be a terrible movie. Some people in this position would tell you that it’s so bad that you have to watch it yourself, but I wouldn’t wish this movie on my worst enemy. Because it’s not ‘so bad, it’s good’, it’s the kind of bad where after what feels like two hours, you realize you’re still in the first act of the movie.
In the movie, Lacey Chabert plays Gretchen Wieners, which, yes, is her character from Mean Girls, but I forgot what her name was in this movie, and I’m afraid to Google it out of fear of what my FBI agent will think of me, so I’m going to call her Gretchen. We open the movie with Gretchen on a date with a guy who openly ogles as many women as possible. He makes a kid walking down the toy aisle look subtle. She tells her friends how annoyed she is that every guy she’s set up with is a scumbag, which makes even less sense when it’s said seconds later that her friends have set her up with all these people. But I didn’t watch Christian Mingle: The Movie to get a coherent storyline.
Dejected, Gretchen goes back to her apartment, which is above a store that sells only clocks and she turns on the TV so she can sit at her table with her back to it. This is where we get our first taste of the plot because a Christian Mingle commercial comes on the air. Since Gretchen isn’t Christian, she scoffs at the idea of that and gets back to work.
Now comes the first real issue of the movie, which is that the movie treats Gretchen as hopeless because she’s thirty years old and not married yet, which is ridiculous and sexist, but it doesn’t end there. In her desperation, she decides to join Christian Mingle even though she’s not Christian. And instead of just using literally any of the non-religious dating services, she not only lies about being Christian but being the most devout Christian possible. And that’s when she meets Paul, a devout Christian who she starts falling in love with.
I could talk for hours about weird moments in this movie, but then this whole review would just be meaningless, so I’m just gonna rattle them off with no context: there’s a forty-second-long bit of a man chewing one piece of sushi in a scene that amounts to literally nothing. The movie portrays Christians as people who have every Bible verse memorized and have Jesus merch in their homes. They go to a restaurant where all they give you is giant platters of steak and a bunch of cakes. Gretchen wears resort clothes to Mexico despite knowing full well she’s going there to volunteer. There is a woman on said service trip who is heavily pregnant and I wonder why she was even allowed to go. Gretchen told nobody she was going to Mexico. After Paul finds out she’s not Christian, she says that she’s willing to change if he’s willing to teach her, and he says that he isn’t. Then she reads the entire Bible, moves to Mexico to teach English, and then meets Paul again, and they decide to get together again.
There are two main problems with this movie: one, it exists. Two, I know it’s dumb to get mad at terrible direct-to-video movies for having a bad message, but I’m going to because it treats Gretchen like she’s completely passive in her own relationship. There’s nothing wrong with being unmarried at thirty and also, don’t get together with a guy who didn’t tell you he was going to Mexico indefinitely and, after you apologized for lying, revealed he was dating somebody else, and then a year later comes back into your life newly single and acts as if the only reason that you weren’t dating was because he had decided “no.”
I just don’t know who this movie is for either. The protagonist is an atheist who converts easily and the antagonists are all Christians. And the movie overall is terrible, so I don’t know what writer/director Corbin Bernsen, the dad from Psych, was trying to accomplish, but he did not accomplish it.
Now I’d like to share a series of out of context quotes, and I’ll let you decide if they’re from the movie, or if I just made them up:
· “Stop it! Stop being poor!”
· “I love stinky cheese. It clogs the pipes, but (wink) still.”
· “I’m buying a dog. Or joining a monastery. Or both, if they let me bring a puppy.”
· “If God didn’t give you hair, you ain’t getting hair. End of story.”
· “Met on Mingle, turned me onto it. Praise the Lord!”
· “Next stop: the delicious train!”
· “Sweet Cheesus!”
· “It’s not about the cheese, it’s the journey to it.”
These are all real lines from this movie.