O come, let us sing unto the Lord: let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation.
If you've ever thought that the story of how the blessed virgin Mary met and wed the Nazarene carpenter Joseph before the two of them traveled to Bethlehem in time for her to give birth to the Son of God would be a really great subject for a teen romcom... wow. I am concerned about how your mind works. But anyway, somebody must have thought that, because here we are with Journey to Bethlehem, which sure enough tries to take the story of the nativity of Christ as presented in the gospels of Matthew and Luke, and smack it into the shape of a Disney Channel original musical.
The film comes to us through the work of the people at Affirm Films, Sony's label for making faith-based movie, which means that despite how much of merrily blasphemous hash this makes of the biblical narratives, this was actually designed to be enjoyed by devout Christians. It's actually not even the first time that Affirm Films has tried to play this exact game: in 2017, the company released The Star, which tried to marry the nativity story with a snarky talking animal comedy, through the medium of some hellaciously bad animation. At least one lesson has been learned since then: that movie was awful, terribly made and nearly unwatchable, while Journey to Bethlehem is terribly made but charming in its earnest kitschiness. It does the thing that movies designed for conservative religious audiences have a significant tendency to do, which is to mimic the cadences of godless hedonistic Hollywood genre productions closely but superficially, hollowly replicating the surface without any of the content that defines the shape of that surface, so it ends up feeling kind of brittle and tinny and deeply artificial, like watching a film where the entire cast and director all learned the language phonetically; I have in the past called these movies "ersatz", and I haven't yet come up with a word that feels to describe the sensation better. Journey to Bethlehem compounds this feeling because in this case, the Hollywood productions it's trying to copy are themselves already kind of brittle and artificial. The phenomenon of Disney Channel original musicals (a subtype so distinctive it has its own acronym, DCOM) - presumably they exist outside of the Disney ecosystem, but the Disney productions are the central examples of the form - is already taking something that exists in the world and denuding it, removing anything about it that is edgy or too dangerously personal, reducing the cast to a uniform, vision of scrubbed, cheery humanity, painting everything in bright lighting that trips out the texture of reality and replaces it with strong, unblemished colors. It's a frictionless and dictatorially upbeat form. And Journey to Bethlehem has somehow endeavored to make a version of this that's even more flavorlessly nice and friendly, going so far as to cast a legit DCOM star in the form of Milo Manheim, the male lead of Disney's Z-O-M-B-I-E-S trilogy. A series whose offensively neutered political metaphor about school bussing and/or the Israeli occupation of Gaza seems downright probing compared to the extravagantly beige attitude on display in this film.
The story is, as the merrily smarmy opening cards inform us in terms that are meant to be "inspiring" and instead come across like an awful college-aged evangelical trying to rouse a classroom of bored kids by talking down to them, the greatest one ever told, to coin a phrase. So you probably know the basics: it's 4 BCE, it's Judea in the last years of semi-autonomous rule under King Herod the Great (Antonio Banderas), the Hebrew god YHWH has decided it's time to make good on those prophecies about a Messiah and has elected to use the virginal maiden Mary (Fiona Palomo) as the vessel to give birth to His incarnation as the Son. This happens during census of all Judean citizens which means that Mary and her husband Joseph (Manheim) have to return to his hometown, which means they must make a... wait for it... journey to Bethlehem. Here she gives birth to her baby and lays him in a manger, because there was no room for them at the inn. Most of which occupies the last quarter or less of Journey to Bethlehem's 98 minutes, with the vast majority of the running time being given over to the two cute, nervous young people (Journey to Bethlehem has very settled ideas about the "age of Joseph" question, and unsurprisingly it has come down on the side of "definitely not an impotent old widower") who are a little prone to bristling at each other largely because Joseph came across as a creepy lecher during their incognito meet-cute before they were officially sat down in the same room by their parents, who've arranged the marriage. And there's a little bit about various characters having a crisis of faith: not really Mary herself, she's pretty much onboard with God's will, she's mostly just concerned that Joseph will be an irresponsible flake. But Joseph has to decide if he believes that Mary's improbable story can possibly be the truth, or if she's a dirty slut who got knocked up by whoring around, expressed of course in the utterly banal family-friendly tones of a children's musical for Christian audiences. And since writer-director Adam Anders and co-writer Peter Barsocchini (the latter was the writer for the towering giant in the DCOM field, 2006's High School Musical and its two sequels) have some sense that movies need conflict, there's a lot of weight given to Herod's paranoid decision to hunt down all the newborn babies in Judea after three bumbling comic relief magi from the east come in with talk of a star that portends the birth of the King of Kings, which gets its own second crisis of faith when Herod's son, Herod Antipater (Joel Smallbone) begins to wonder if slaughtering infants on his father's command might possibly mean that Dad is a bit unhinged. And credit to the authors for doing their research: I assumed that "Herod Antipater" was a bizarre mistake for "Herod Antipas", the son of Herod the Great, and the "King Herod" who shows up again later in the Bible, but turns out that Antipater was the actual eldest son of Herod the Great, and he was in fact executed for attempted regicide in 4 BCE, which feels like it might make for a strong hook for an action-packed Journey to Bethlehem 2.
The film's approach is fairly consistent - treat this all as a charmingly silly kids' romcom, with dopey pratfalling and everything - and the results mostly come in one of two flavors. In dialogue scenes, it's kind of hair-raising how just tacky this all is, transforming Mary into a pretty generic Disney princess type, among the many other ways it treats the religious text at its center with a pretty undisguised lack of any actual respect or sincerity, which raises the question of who the target audience is. Protestants who love kitsch, I guess. Barsocchini's background means he knows the ropes of shitty, undemanding tween comedy, and seeing these kind of "hapless Everykid" writing tics applied to a costume drama is already kind of weird, seeing them applied to the Nativity story is kind of deliciously mind-melting. The overall feeling that the film has not fully worked out, or even started to work out, what the hell it wants its tone to be, how earnestly it's taking the story, and how to balance ungodly shticky jokes with religious awe, is omnipresent in everything, though it's most manifest in the completely incompatible, lost performances given by the leads. Manheim is the only cast member who seems to have made one choice and stuck with it, and he brings to the table a grimly dogged attempt to some kind of vaguely Midatlantic accent, playing Joseph as a '40s-style light comedy type, an elegant dandy with a warm heart and no brains to speak of. It's something, and I don't have any idea why it's the thing he thought of, or why Anders okayed it - but Anders, a Swedish pop impresario making his first feature film, obviously has no kind of firm hand on the rudder, not with his actors nor with anything else - but it looks like actual acting compared to Palomo's absolute windsock of a performance, receiving no support from any other aspect of the filmmaking. She's obliged to hold down the entire movie anyway, so she just looks confused the whole time and only remotely manages to latch onto anything in the character during the most overtly religious scenes where the comedy gets downplayed the hardest.
The comedy is also one of the things where the movie seems to have no idea at all what the hell it wants to be: e.g. the Annunciation is staged as slapstick comedy, with the archangel Gabriel (Lecrae, apparently a big name in the world of Christian rap music, which I suppose I shouldn't be surprised to learn exists) smashing his face into doorjambs and all sorts of shenanigans, while some very chintzy visual effects try to convince us and Mary that he's a supernatural messenger from God. But it's also the Annunciation, so Palomo is treating it with great gravity, and the moment the slapstick is over, the film attempts to regroup towards respecting the import of the moment, and it's like no, you don't get to do that, not if you're somebody whose directing is as completely without nuance or any sense of control as Anders's is.
So that's one flavor: cheap, dumb tween comedy and romance made kind of deliciously gaudy through the application to this material. The other flavor is pure, balls-out camp, any time there is music (and the film is generous with these; almost a third of the running time is sung), or any time Banderas is onscreen, or, mirabile dictu, when Banderas sings. He only really does this once, but it's the majority of his screentime (there is some powerful "guys we have Antonio for two days, make it count" energy to how Banderas is plopped into the movie, and unceremoniously removed from it). And in a film where all of the songs (written by Adam Anders alongside Nikki Anders and Peer Åström) have a zesty trashiness to them, mangling language in an effort to create jingling empty sonic sensations that have at most a vague "it's not not Broadway" sensibility, Banderas's villain song "Good to Be King" is the unabashed highlight. This is in large part because Banderas himself is going all-in on playing Herod as a ridiculous pantomime bad guy, swanning about and glowering through his eyeliner and swaggering about in his hilariously awful costume that puts him in soldier's armor decorated with plastic abs. But also the song itself is the most garish in the film, a generic rock anthem that stands out for being the loudest and heaviest piece in a pretty weightless soundtrack, while also offering the wonderful treat of a parody of the Lord's Prayer - "Mine is the kingdom, mine is the power", etc. - set to a piece of music that sounds like it's been stolen outright from a Muse single.
But really, all of the musical numbers are so-bad-it's-good fun: cataloguing all of the tortured rhymes could be a game in and of itself (the film refuses to rhyme the word "king" with any other word ending in "-ing"), and there's enormous charm in how Anders has obviously decided that throwing 20 people all doing the same arm-waving movement is close enough to choreographing a group dance to count. There's even a moment that's sort of actually good in an incredibly stupid way, when Joseph's internal battle between trusting or doubting Mary is staged as a dance battle between Milo Manheim and himself, one version wearing a white robe and one wearing a red robe. It's idiotic, but it's got a ton of unrelenting energy, and while I understand that's an extremely different thing than claiming Journey to Bethlehem is in any way good - it emphatically isn't - it's at least pretty damn watchable in its sugary madness.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
The film comes to us through the work of the people at Affirm Films, Sony's label for making faith-based movie, which means that despite how much of merrily blasphemous hash this makes of the biblical narratives, this was actually designed to be enjoyed by devout Christians. It's actually not even the first time that Affirm Films has tried to play this exact game: in 2017, the company released The Star, which tried to marry the nativity story with a snarky talking animal comedy, through the medium of some hellaciously bad animation. At least one lesson has been learned since then: that movie was awful, terribly made and nearly unwatchable, while Journey to Bethlehem is terribly made but charming in its earnest kitschiness. It does the thing that movies designed for conservative religious audiences have a significant tendency to do, which is to mimic the cadences of godless hedonistic Hollywood genre productions closely but superficially, hollowly replicating the surface without any of the content that defines the shape of that surface, so it ends up feeling kind of brittle and tinny and deeply artificial, like watching a film where the entire cast and director all learned the language phonetically; I have in the past called these movies "ersatz", and I haven't yet come up with a word that feels to describe the sensation better. Journey to Bethlehem compounds this feeling because in this case, the Hollywood productions it's trying to copy are themselves already kind of brittle and artificial. The phenomenon of Disney Channel original musicals (a subtype so distinctive it has its own acronym, DCOM) - presumably they exist outside of the Disney ecosystem, but the Disney productions are the central examples of the form - is already taking something that exists in the world and denuding it, removing anything about it that is edgy or too dangerously personal, reducing the cast to a uniform, vision of scrubbed, cheery humanity, painting everything in bright lighting that trips out the texture of reality and replaces it with strong, unblemished colors. It's a frictionless and dictatorially upbeat form. And Journey to Bethlehem has somehow endeavored to make a version of this that's even more flavorlessly nice and friendly, going so far as to cast a legit DCOM star in the form of Milo Manheim, the male lead of Disney's Z-O-M-B-I-E-S trilogy. A series whose offensively neutered political metaphor about school bussing and/or the Israeli occupation of Gaza seems downright probing compared to the extravagantly beige attitude on display in this film.
The story is, as the merrily smarmy opening cards inform us in terms that are meant to be "inspiring" and instead come across like an awful college-aged evangelical trying to rouse a classroom of bored kids by talking down to them, the greatest one ever told, to coin a phrase. So you probably know the basics: it's 4 BCE, it's Judea in the last years of semi-autonomous rule under King Herod the Great (Antonio Banderas), the Hebrew god YHWH has decided it's time to make good on those prophecies about a Messiah and has elected to use the virginal maiden Mary (Fiona Palomo) as the vessel to give birth to His incarnation as the Son. This happens during census of all Judean citizens which means that Mary and her husband Joseph (Manheim) have to return to his hometown, which means they must make a... wait for it... journey to Bethlehem. Here she gives birth to her baby and lays him in a manger, because there was no room for them at the inn. Most of which occupies the last quarter or less of Journey to Bethlehem's 98 minutes, with the vast majority of the running time being given over to the two cute, nervous young people (Journey to Bethlehem has very settled ideas about the "age of Joseph" question, and unsurprisingly it has come down on the side of "definitely not an impotent old widower") who are a little prone to bristling at each other largely because Joseph came across as a creepy lecher during their incognito meet-cute before they were officially sat down in the same room by their parents, who've arranged the marriage. And there's a little bit about various characters having a crisis of faith: not really Mary herself, she's pretty much onboard with God's will, she's mostly just concerned that Joseph will be an irresponsible flake. But Joseph has to decide if he believes that Mary's improbable story can possibly be the truth, or if she's a dirty slut who got knocked up by whoring around, expressed of course in the utterly banal family-friendly tones of a children's musical for Christian audiences. And since writer-director Adam Anders and co-writer Peter Barsocchini (the latter was the writer for the towering giant in the DCOM field, 2006's High School Musical and its two sequels) have some sense that movies need conflict, there's a lot of weight given to Herod's paranoid decision to hunt down all the newborn babies in Judea after three bumbling comic relief magi from the east come in with talk of a star that portends the birth of the King of Kings, which gets its own second crisis of faith when Herod's son, Herod Antipater (Joel Smallbone) begins to wonder if slaughtering infants on his father's command might possibly mean that Dad is a bit unhinged. And credit to the authors for doing their research: I assumed that "Herod Antipater" was a bizarre mistake for "Herod Antipas", the son of Herod the Great, and the "King Herod" who shows up again later in the Bible, but turns out that Antipater was the actual eldest son of Herod the Great, and he was in fact executed for attempted regicide in 4 BCE, which feels like it might make for a strong hook for an action-packed Journey to Bethlehem 2.
The film's approach is fairly consistent - treat this all as a charmingly silly kids' romcom, with dopey pratfalling and everything - and the results mostly come in one of two flavors. In dialogue scenes, it's kind of hair-raising how just tacky this all is, transforming Mary into a pretty generic Disney princess type, among the many other ways it treats the religious text at its center with a pretty undisguised lack of any actual respect or sincerity, which raises the question of who the target audience is. Protestants who love kitsch, I guess. Barsocchini's background means he knows the ropes of shitty, undemanding tween comedy, and seeing these kind of "hapless Everykid" writing tics applied to a costume drama is already kind of weird, seeing them applied to the Nativity story is kind of deliciously mind-melting. The overall feeling that the film has not fully worked out, or even started to work out, what the hell it wants its tone to be, how earnestly it's taking the story, and how to balance ungodly shticky jokes with religious awe, is omnipresent in everything, though it's most manifest in the completely incompatible, lost performances given by the leads. Manheim is the only cast member who seems to have made one choice and stuck with it, and he brings to the table a grimly dogged attempt to some kind of vaguely Midatlantic accent, playing Joseph as a '40s-style light comedy type, an elegant dandy with a warm heart and no brains to speak of. It's something, and I don't have any idea why it's the thing he thought of, or why Anders okayed it - but Anders, a Swedish pop impresario making his first feature film, obviously has no kind of firm hand on the rudder, not with his actors nor with anything else - but it looks like actual acting compared to Palomo's absolute windsock of a performance, receiving no support from any other aspect of the filmmaking. She's obliged to hold down the entire movie anyway, so she just looks confused the whole time and only remotely manages to latch onto anything in the character during the most overtly religious scenes where the comedy gets downplayed the hardest.
The comedy is also one of the things where the movie seems to have no idea at all what the hell it wants to be: e.g. the Annunciation is staged as slapstick comedy, with the archangel Gabriel (Lecrae, apparently a big name in the world of Christian rap music, which I suppose I shouldn't be surprised to learn exists) smashing his face into doorjambs and all sorts of shenanigans, while some very chintzy visual effects try to convince us and Mary that he's a supernatural messenger from God. But it's also the Annunciation, so Palomo is treating it with great gravity, and the moment the slapstick is over, the film attempts to regroup towards respecting the import of the moment, and it's like no, you don't get to do that, not if you're somebody whose directing is as completely without nuance or any sense of control as Anders's is.
So that's one flavor: cheap, dumb tween comedy and romance made kind of deliciously gaudy through the application to this material. The other flavor is pure, balls-out camp, any time there is music (and the film is generous with these; almost a third of the running time is sung), or any time Banderas is onscreen, or, mirabile dictu, when Banderas sings. He only really does this once, but it's the majority of his screentime (there is some powerful "guys we have Antonio for two days, make it count" energy to how Banderas is plopped into the movie, and unceremoniously removed from it). And in a film where all of the songs (written by Adam Anders alongside Nikki Anders and Peer Åström) have a zesty trashiness to them, mangling language in an effort to create jingling empty sonic sensations that have at most a vague "it's not not Broadway" sensibility, Banderas's villain song "Good to Be King" is the unabashed highlight. This is in large part because Banderas himself is going all-in on playing Herod as a ridiculous pantomime bad guy, swanning about and glowering through his eyeliner and swaggering about in his hilariously awful costume that puts him in soldier's armor decorated with plastic abs. But also the song itself is the most garish in the film, a generic rock anthem that stands out for being the loudest and heaviest piece in a pretty weightless soundtrack, while also offering the wonderful treat of a parody of the Lord's Prayer - "Mine is the kingdom, mine is the power", etc. - set to a piece of music that sounds like it's been stolen outright from a Muse single.
But really, all of the musical numbers are so-bad-it's-good fun: cataloguing all of the tortured rhymes could be a game in and of itself (the film refuses to rhyme the word "king" with any other word ending in "-ing"), and there's enormous charm in how Anders has obviously decided that throwing 20 people all doing the same arm-waving movement is close enough to choreographing a group dance to count. There's even a moment that's sort of actually good in an incredibly stupid way, when Joseph's internal battle between trusting or doubting Mary is staged as a dance battle between Milo Manheim and himself, one version wearing a white robe and one wearing a red robe. It's idiotic, but it's got a ton of unrelenting energy, and while I understand that's an extremely different thing than claiming Journey to Bethlehem is in any way good - it emphatically isn't - it's at least pretty damn watchable in its sugary madness.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
