GoogalyBoy_the 10th

As someone who’s not usually a fan of most christian media unless it’s Veggietales, I was honestly surprised by how good this musical was. I was originally just interested solely because of Joel Smallbone (one of the two duo members of For King & Country) being casted as the Antiparter, but as more of the movie released it seemed like it gained more potential as it went on. I recently watched the film and I gotta say, it was way better than I was thinking it was gonna be. The cast does a great job, the sets and locations are nice, and the music is shockingly good. The music is very varied in terms of style so you don’t always know exactly what you’ll be getting each time. The songs seamlessly flow with the rest of the story and also allow for some really cool scenes (there’s one song in particular involving Joseph that’s really cool and unique with how it’s executed). My one main issue with this film however, is weirdly enough, the villain. Don’t get me wrong, Antonio does a great job as him and his song number is great, but I just wish they did a bit more with him, to pose him as more of a threat. He doesn’t really do a lot besides threatening and teasing people and sleeping all the time, kinda like an extreme evil Garfield. It was just a bit underwhelming on that front. However there are other aspects of the film that make up that issue, such as the comedy. I genuinely wasn’t expecting a lot of good comedy from a film about the birth of Jesus, but there’s a surprising amount of it here in some pretty unexpected places too. This movie was an unexpected good time and I could easily see this get a small following as an underrated Christmas classic in the future. I recommend it, religious or not.