Facing the Giants is one of those films that's liable to inspire a separation of church and cinema. There's always been a fine line between movies with religious stories and movies with religious overtones. The difference between the two? The former category tends to churn out more solemn, thought-provoking meditations on faith and divinity -- whereas offerings from the latter group generally come across as filmic sermons. Unfortunately, Facing the Giants emerges as a bona fide preach-a-thon, an inspirational drama that has its heart in the right place but loses its storytelling skills somewhere in the heavens.

Alex Kendrick, the film's director and co-writer, also stars as Grant Taylor, a normal man going through an incredibly rough patch in his life. After six years as the football coach for a Christian high school, Grant has yet to lead his team, the Shiloh Eagles, to a single championship, a fact that local boosters have definitely noted. On top of that, his car is dying, his house is falling apart piece by piece, and he and his wife Brooke (Shannen Fields) still can't seem to have a baby.

However, just when rumors surface about Grant being ousted from his job and things look like they can't get any worse, Grant turns to the Almighty for guidance and assistance -- which the Big Guy seems to deal out to our depressed hero in spades. As the season progresses, Grant inspires his team not to give up before they even set foot on the gridiron. Then, as these athletes propel themselves from victory to victory, the Eagles have to go an extra mile or two in order to gather the courage to take on their rivals and three consecutive championship victors, the Richland Giants.

Facing the Giants is in the unfortunate position of being a religiously-themed sports fable, not simply a sports movie. While watching it, viewers have to contend with the standard cornball conventions of the sports genre (the troubled players, the noble but flawed coach, the Big Game at the end of the movie) as well as with a simplistic, tried-and-true premise that brings up God once in a while to make up for its plot-related shortcomings. I'm all for faith-based stories that mean well and strive to pass along the importanance of a good set of morals to viewers, but when the messenger is such a lumbering, predictable, cliche-driven behemoth as Facing the Giants, all I could do was sit back and bemoan how much the message itself suffered over the course of this film.

Facing the Giants does include some compelling moments, and the story generates more sympathy than, say, The Miracle Match -- and a few other incredibly dull sports movies. But in terms of acting, Facing the Giants seems merely up to par with the performances in a high school play. Cast members put only a bare  minimum of oomph into their characters, just enough to indicate what emotion they're feeling at the moment, and they have a habit of almost projecting to the back of the house, unaware that a handy little invention called the speaker can indeed carry their voices throughout the theater. 

Never any better or worse than mediocre, Facing the Giants will probably slip quietly into 2006's pantheon of sports cinema and drift into relative obscurity. 

MY RATING: ** (out of ****)

(Released by Samuel Goldwyn Films and rated "PG" for some thematic elements.)