Ring the Bell

RING THE BELL starts out innocently enough. Here's a story about a hard-charging sports agent whose cockiness all but begs for a takedown, and there's some baseball thrown in to boot. The problem is, you don't expect the takedown to be quite so long-winded or quite so overt a sell on Christianity. What follows are a serious of scenes of sincere, long, thoughtful conversations about God, faith, and change and a host of characters full of preternaturally deep, folksy, Bible-quoting wisdom. Everyone is saintly in his or her devotion to goodness; each is waiting patiently for as long as it takes for the main character to come around. There are scenes designed to show the goodness of Christians, but they're sentimental and overwrought: a pair of siblings who run an orphanage whose own parents then died in a plane crash, making them orphans; an entire Christian music performance, sermon, and call to confess wedged in the middle of the film. It veers into caricature before it can preach to anyone but the choir and renders everything in black and white. There are people who believe and people who don't, and it's highly doubtful anyone who doesn't is going to find inspiration here.