Family / Christian drama
2024 / 125 minutes
Rating: 7/10
Isaiah is a high school graduate, unemployed, still living with his mom, and spending his time playing video games. He’s got no ambitions, and only starts looking for work when his mom delivers an ultimatum: get a job or get out. So he starts applying, as much to get his mom to stop bothering him as anything else. And that attitude gets in the way even as he’s filling in his first application – some old guy starts chatting him up, and Isaiah doesn’t have any time for him.
“I’m just trying to see about a job, all right? What, you a salesman for this company?”
But that old guy turns out to be the company president. Whoops!
Isaiah thinks he’s blown it, but this gentleman, Joshua Moore, is more than just the president of Moore Fitness – he’s also the leader of The Forge, a mentorship group made up of older men who come together twice a week to share a meal with the young men they are deliberately discipling. And, Isaiah’s less than impressive application marks him as a young man in need of what The Forge has to offer. So Isaiah ends up with a job, and a mentor, much to his mom’s delight.
That deliberate discipleship is the moral to this message movie. Young men are not growing up like they need to, and The Forge’s producers want the older generation of Christians to step up and invest in their lives, and show them how it’s done.
Cautions
There aren’t many cautions along the lines of sex/language/violence concerns. But one of the Christian reviews encapsulated a concern with this title: “If You Want Young Men To Leave Christianity, Have Them Watch ‘The Forge’” While the title is over the top, it makes a decent point:
“This is clearly not a movie for the men who are lost; this is a movie for their moms. Worse, it’s a movie that will probably not inspire lost men to turn around, but rather push them further away. The film largely ignores putting us in Isaiah’s point of view or understanding his perspective….”
So, if your son has worn a dent into the couch in your basement, this film isn’t going shake him up – he’ll say the producers just don’t really get him. But if you’re an older man, wondering if there might be a way to help, this could be a challenge and an inspiration.
Conclusion
The Forge is the 9th faith-based film from siblings Alex, Shannon, and Stephen Kendrick. The Kendricks started their movie-making way back in 2003, with Flywheel, a quietly quirky story of a used car salesman whose life gets turned upside down when he bows his knee to God and now needs to reform his sleazy salesman ways. In it, and every film since, the Kendrick Brothers embraced the idea of using cinema to deliver sermons, and they did so unapologetically. Their storytelling suffered for their complete lack of subtlety – there are a lot of lectures delivered throughout The Forge to make sure we got the message – they got their messages delivered to millions, and that’s the point. So if you’re looking for Oscar-winning acting or slick cinematography, you will have to look elsewhere (though their production values these days are on par with many a Hollywood production). If you’re looking for a solid sermon, powerfully delivered, then The Forge may just be your jam.
The appeal here is that it is a good sermon. Even in churches where older men are eager to get involved in the lives of the next generation, there’s not likely to be the sort of deliberateness shown here. Is Isaiah’s abrupt, and almost instantaneous turnaround realistic? Nope – in real life young men who have built up bad habits are going to have a hard time digging themselves out of those deep ruts. But are there young men who are, for want of a real life mentor, turning to a Jordan Peterson, or maybe even a Nick Fuentes-type, because they are looking for someone to teach them what it means to be a man? Yup. So there is definitely a harvest in need of harvesters.
