DIE IN A GUNFIGHT

Name: DIE IN A GUNFIGHT
Item: DIE IN A GUNFIGHT
Author: Tess Farrand

"Paper Thin, Shallow and Immoral"

Family Content: -4 Intentional blasphemy, evil, gross immorality, and/or worldview problems. (To be avoided)

Entertainment Quality:

	None	Light	Moderate	Heavy
Language
Violence
Sex
Nudity

Credits →

What You Need To Know:

DIE IN A GUNFIGHT is a crime movie inspired by Shakespeare’s ROMEO AND JULIET. Ben and Mary are a young couple from rival families of media moguls. Torn apart years ago, Ben and Mary find one another again. However, Mary is being trailed by a hitman/spy named Terrence hired by Mary’s parents to keep her from Ben, and Terrence has fallen for Mary too. When the couple entrusts Ben’s mother with knowledge of their wedding, she tells a couple other people she thinks she can trust. Unfortunately, Terrence and a rival hitman get the word as well, endangering the couple and putting their wedding in jeopardy.

DIE IN A GUNFIGHT doesn’t work on any level. The characters are shallow, with Ben unlikeable, and Mary just an airhead. The performances are over the top, and all the other characters are even more poorly drawn. Also, the attempts at comedy in DIE IN A GUNFIGHT aren’t funny, its action scenes are unimpressive, and the movie has a strong non-Christian

worldview with lots of strong foul language, some graphic violence, depicted drug use, and other immoral content.

Content:

(RoRo, ABAB, LL, VVV, S, N, AA, DDD, MM)

Dominant Worldview and Other Worldview Content/Elements:

Strong Romantic worldview in a crime story that modernizes the plot of Romeo and Juliet, with some overt anti-Christian, anti-biblical content in a wedding scene where the person leading the vows calls Adam and Eve “the Judeo-Christian creation myth” and romanticizes Adam and Eve’s breaking God’s rules in the Garden of Eden

Foul Language:

18 obscenities (including nine “f” words), three GD profanities, and three strong profanities referring to Jesus

Violence:

Very strong violence where a man stomps another man to death with blood flying all over him (the body is unseen, however), and strong violence includes several fatal shootings, (some of the deaths are off-camera with just the shooting shown), three fistfights which also involve kicking, man stabs another man, and a man fantasizes about acting like an ape as he destroys a table full of dishes

Sex:

Implied fornication where the main couple are seen in bed kissing passionately when they take their tops off with the man fully shirtless and the woman in a bra before the scene fades away and comes back to show them lying in bed together afterwards, plus some light sexual comments

Nudity:

A man is seen shirtless as he starts to have sexual relations with a woman and afterwards, and the woman is shown in a bra

Alcohol Use:

Alcohol use to excess and drunkenness

Smoking and/or Drug Use and Abuse:

Cigarette smoking, marijuana use, cocaine use, and a character uses pills; and, Miscellaneous: A news report discusses that one of the families involved in the movie have a scandal due to having the computers they make spy on users, rival hitmen are hired to kill people, stealing, and duplicity and backstabbing are rampant in the plot.

More Detail:

There have been countless stories inspired by the star-crossed lovers of Shakespeare’s ROMEO AND JULIET. The new action-comedy DIE IN A GUNFIGHT tries to join that pantheon. However, this story of a young man and a young woman from rival families of media moguls, who try to reignite their forbidden love with ultimately tragic circumstances, is a failure on all levels. Its attempts at comedy fail to be funny, its action scenes are unimpressive, the acting and writing are cartoonishly bad, and the movie has a strong non-Christian worldview, lots of strong foul language, some graphic violence, depicted drug use, and other immoral content.

The movie opens with some admittedly fun animation explaining the life of its protagonist Ben (Diego Boneta), who is described by narrator Billy Crudup as having taken part in and lost more than 700 fights. He’s the bad-boy heir to a communications-mogul fortune, and his parents want to keep him away from his true love Mary (Alexandra Daddario), the daughter of their rival.

The movie’s plot is paper-thin and way too simple to sustain interest. Basically, Ben and Mary don’t care what their families think and decide they’ll be together, and Ben asks her to marry him in ridiculously fast fashion. Mary is being trailed by a hitman/spy named Terence hired by her parents to keep her from Ben, and Terence has fallen for her as well.

When the couple entrusts Ben’s mother with knowledge of their wedding, she tells a couple other people she thinks she can trust. But, as Terence and a rival hitman get the word as well, can the wedding happen safely, or is our loving couple in danger?

The movie also has wall-to-wall narration. This is a sign of lazy writing, because the narrator has to incessantly tell viewers everything. Worst of all is its insulting slap at Christianity during the wedding scene, when the man leading the vows mocks the story of Adam and Eve as the “Judeo-Christian creation myth” and romanticizes their rebellion against God in the Garden of Eden.

Lazy, uninspired and boring, DIE IN A GUNFIGHT is a worthless viewing experience for anyone. It has a strong Romantic worldview with little to no redemptive content, lots of strong foul language, implied sexual immorality, depicted drug use, and graphic violence.