God's Army Reviews

From Zion Films, a company dedicated to making "movies by Mormons, for Mormons," comes what must stand as the first commercial film to look seriously at the lives of Mormon missionaries. And while it doesn't look too deeply — there's surprisingly little talk about the actual tenets of the Mormon faith — it does address a few objections any future member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints might have before joining up. The story centers around 19-year-old Brandon Allen (Matthew Brown), a lifelong Mormon who leaves his troubled home in Kansas for two years of missionary work in sin-soaked L.A. He's teamed up with ailing Elder Dalton (Richard Dutcher, who also wrote and directed the film), whose advanced age (he's 29) has earned him the nickname "Pops" among his younger charges. Elder Allen moves into a single-sex group home shared by five of his fellow missionaries and soon settles into a strict regimen that begins at the crack of dawn with a few hours of study, followed by hitting the streets in their white shirts, black neckties and name tags, "doing some good" one door at a time. But it's not all God's work and no play: In their downtime, these boys like to have fun. They tell leper jokes, put salt in each other's cereal and kick in the bathroom door to take pictures of each other sitting on the can. By making mission work the focus of his film, Dutcher leaves a lot of room for discussions, conversions and baptisms, as well as fielding a few thorny questions about the role of women and African-Americans in the LDS Church. It's unfair to accuse any film that's so up-front about what it's doing of having an agenda; this slick film is all about changing minds. But while some may admire the strength of Dutcher's convictions, not everyone will be comfortable with a story that's as geared toward recruitment as any Army film, be it God's or Uncle Sam's.