Review: Unplanned
Unplanned, directed by Chuck Konzelman and Cary Solomon, tells the tale of Abby Johnson (Ashley Bratcher), a woman who joins the EVIL Planned Parenthood and works her way up the ranks to be one of its esteemed employees. All that changes when she partakes in an abortion procedure and sees for herself what she got herself into. This is her story.
This is the latest film from Christian film studio Pure Flix, which I haven’t exactly been buddy-buddy with. This film marks the directoral debuts of Chuck Konzelman and Cary Solomon, who previously wrote the first two films of the God’s Not Dead trilogy. God’s Not Dead was an absolute train-wreck of offensive proportions and God’s Not Dead 2 remains as one of the absolute worst films I have ever seen thus far. Now I wasn’t really looking forward to this movie but I checked it out anyways because this film has a lot of controversy to it, which is easily understandable given that it’s a movie about abortion, a pretty controversial topic in itself. After giving it a watch I have to say it’s exactly how I’d imagine a movie about abortion from the guys who wrote God’s Not Dead would be like. This film was unsurprisingly terrible, and honestly it adds nothing to the argument about abortion.
Now I’ll do my very best not to talk too much about the topic of abortion itself; this is a movie review after all. Regardless of what your stance on the topic is, one thing that I believe both sides can agree on is that this film will not change your mind either way. This is very much a pro-life movie; the filmmakers are very proud of that seeing as how they proudly make the disclaimer that Planned Parenthood had absolutely NOTHING to do with this film. The filmmakers very clearly don’t care about the other side of the argument, as they portrayed the workers of Planned Parenthood as devilish cartoon characters. I really don’t enjoy this level of ignorance, but again, this is a movie review of a pro-life propaganda piece, so we’re here to review it as a movie, and as a movie it’s pretty dang terrible.
You can tell what my biggest issue with this movie is just by the first couple minutes. This is based on the accounts of Abby Johnson and her experiences working for Planned Parenthood. Everything about that story is told through narration, and by everything I mean EVERYTHING. Nothing is left to the audience’s interpretation; the film literally spells out every thought and feeling that each character goes though. There is one scene in the film where Abby has to work overtime to finish a bunch of women’s appointments before a hurricane hits the facility, and instead of showing us the stress that everyone in that scene is going through, the film TELLS us everything that’s happening. This is the single most lazy method of story-telling you can come up with. The film literally treats its audience like babies that don’t understand simple pictures and needs someone to describe it for them.
Everything else about the film is about as bad as you can imagine from a film made by the writers of God’s Not Dead. The cinematography’s amateurish, the editing’s amateurish, the sequence of events is presented in a sloppy manner, the lighting’s cheap, the characters are either uninteresting or cartoonish, and surprise surprise the writing’s absolutely laughable. The one and only aspect I mildly enjoyed in this film is Ashley Bratcher’s performance as Johnson, but even then it’s just serviceable. She does try given that she has pretty much nothing to work with, but her performance is nothing really noteworthy. Outside of that, everything else about this movie was pretty much trash.
Overall this movie sucks, and I’m honestly not surprised about that fact. I feel like there’s a simple explanation on why the Secret Shadowy Society of Communist Democrat Lizard People tried to silence this movie. It’s not because what this movie has to say about abortion is too damaging for the public to know; I feel like the reason this movie is being silenced is because this movie just sucks. If you’re a pro-life Christian Conservative who absolutely hates Planned Parenthood and everything they stand for and doesn’t care about watching a movie that’s actually, you know, good, then by all means go ahead and watch this movie; let these “film-makers” tickle your ears on stuff that you already believe in. If you’re not in that camp and want to just watch a good movie, then skip this movie, but I think you already did.
Final Verdict: 1/10