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How sad is this?

Excellent, Without a doubt!!

Absolutely Fantastic

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

Jesus Christ! This film is bad. I would have given one star but gave three for its moral goal - that being to turn people away from the antiquated christian belief structure which is but one of the global religions that continue to subjugated the poorest, ergo uneducated, humans on the planet.If any wavering christian watched this pseudo-saccharine slop they would quickly be freed of their mental slavery & thank goodness for that.Think about it; having had a well educated, hard working, ergo mentally stimulating & financially rewarding life with a hot full-lipped vamp temptress in your bed you suddenly wake to a thin-lipped uptight judgmental ball & chain & 2 bratty kids - hell's bells! You'd be mortified. I know which life I'd pick. Then again, one of his imaginary daughters did have big bosoms so there's an upside to every dog's dinner.

I can understand some folks not liking this movie...however, If you like "fantasy", and you could say "si-fi", and of course heart warming family stories, this is for you...Hot shot successful business man gets to go back for a second shot at life...All actors are endearing and play the parts well as they steal your heart.Not enough of these movies around...Like I said earlier, this is a movie for Christian believers especially...Maybe it will turn a heart of the non-believer...who knows

I very much enjoyed this movie, and though rare for me, I found myself tearing up more than once during this film. The acting was very good, and even the youngest girl was quite believable. The message was spot on as well.I want to address something I realized about the plot of this movie, which none of the current reviews (including the "it is a recreation of a recreation..." complaints) cover. The plot of this movie is much more complex than your typical "experiencing what an alternate world would be like if you do / don't make a certain decision", and I did not fully understand exactly what happened in this movie until considering it after the fact. I had such a preconceived notion of what was going to happen - that Ben would be taken back in time and get to decide again whether or not to leave on that bus - that when the movie went in an entirely different direction I didn't fully grasp what really happened.When Ben is taken by the angel to an "alternate reality" he is actually taken into his own future. This movie is not about undoing anything, or changing the past. It isn't even a movie about making the right choice, because Ben is never really given a choice to make. This film is about how a person's environment can drastically change them into someone else and cause them to deviate from God's will, and how the love and devotion of a Godly spouse is so important to any minister (or any Christian for that matter). Essentially Ben is given the gift of experiencing how fulfilled and happy he would be if married to Wendy, has children and is a minister. That simply wipes away the superficial lust and desires of his material life and shows him what he lacks. The entire point in the angel visiting Ben and letting him experience his future was simply to bring out the "real" Ben. Thus when Ben caught up to Wendy at the bus stop at the end of the movie and she's about to leave, she gets to see the true Ben she learned to love so many years before, and not the jaded, materialistic Ben.So here's the kicker - Wendy is the one that makes the important decision in this movie, and it is a vastly more difficult decision than the bad choice Ben made 13 years earlier. He had just popped up out of the blue, and it took tremendous faith for her to decide to give Ben a second chance after all that time. Wendy is a tremendous woman throughout this entire movie, and God went to all the trouble he did for her sake, to help her make the right decision.In fact, unlike other films of this type, we don't even see the "bad" alternate reality, which is what would have happened had Wendy left and Ben was left without her. Perhaps he would've returned to his life of investment banking and indeed he would've been like the old man finally seeking forgiveness on his death bed. But it wasn't Ben's decision that kept him from that fate - it was Wendy who truly saves him in the end.

"It's finally a well-made Christian movie," people said. "It's a faith-based family movie that gets its messages across without hitting you with it over the head," people said. "It's the best work Kevin Sorbo has ever done," people said. Well, it isn't. Whatever "What If" may be, what it is not is certainly any of the above.And, frankly: I am hard-pressed to say what it really is and what the hell it wants (and I'm choosing my words deliberately here). What it quite possibly might be, is a vehicle to show you what excellent acting can do in order to carry along a crappy script set in scene by an uninspired director. Because although it is most definitely not the best work Kevin Sorbo has ever done (Andromeda, Hercules, Walking Tall, Avenging Angel, The Santa Suit anyone?), he does do a marvelous job here, congenially supported by Kristy Swanson and John Ratzenberger. But even the best acting can only accomplish so much.The script is a mess - and a bad mess at that. Ben Walker leaves his home town for the big city, leaving behind his fiancée (why?) and his ministry calling (one may question how strong a calling this might have been in the first place) to take someone up on an offer for a business opportunity. 15 years later he is a successful investment banker, with a talent for merciless deals and a fancy for tailor-cut suits, expensive cars and beautiful women. We get the info that he's left his girl and his calling to fend for themselves, without ever throwing a look back. How some small-town theologian mutated into an investment banker no-one really knows. What's worse: no-one even seems to ask this question ever. Instead, the movie deals in easy messages: big city, fancy cars, uptown girls, nice clothes and general cleanness = bad, ugly houses in lower middle class neighborhoods populated by badly dressed, slightly dirty people with slightly slutty teenage daughters = good.This is the enviable environment God chooses to drop Ben Walker in, after forcibly removing him from his upper class life on the fast lane. After a weird encounter with an angel masquerading as a mechanic that ends with a knock-out, he wakes up to being the longtime husband of Wendy (the girl he'd left many years before), the father of the said slutty teenage daughter (most woodenly played by the remarkably untalented Debbie Ryan) and another about 7-8-year-old, "supposed to be intoxicating sweet" one (Taylor Groothuis in an annoying cover-version of Shirley Temple) and the newly appointed pastor of a broke church and congregation. After much struggle and a lot of wise words from his very own, godly appointed personal angel, Ben Walker comes to like this new life and starts succeeding at it. Paradoxically, his success in this brave, new "white trash"-world is marked by him using the skills, talents and wisdoms he's developed in his big city, investment banking career.As a result, the most predominant message of this most inspired work of art is: make lots of money, it can solve every problem you eventually might have.At some point (somewhere midway through the dramatic finale) the creative minds behind all of this must have realized that something's not quite working out the way it should. In they threw a dying rich old man, who Ben conveniently puts back on track to God, thereby saving both "Scrooge's" and his own soul by it – for the sermon meant for the rich guy is, of course, also meant for himself, since the rich guy is nothing but a parabola of what Ben would end up as, were he to continue on the big city, big career road, blah, blah, blah… In case we didn't get that, he gets to spell it out later in a discussion with his personal angel, who chooses right this moment to inform him that God has now decided that Ben has learned his lesson and may now return back to his old life. May? No. Must!!! So presumably, the second message of What If is "after solving it all by throwing some money at the world, remember that God is a bit of a sadist who likes to toy around with the lives of mortals", in short: the kind of deity Hercules would have found worthy of some major ass-kicking.Back in his old life, Ben then quickly reforms by answering God's call: he dumps his fiancée (apparently, God told him to save himself and the world, but rich, middle-aged beauties do not qualify to be among the ones deemed worthy of such endeavor), quits his job, throws some more money and luxury goods at hospital employees and parochial helps and rejoins the simple girl with a heart of gold he'd left many years ago – who apparently didn't build up anything resembling a life in those 15 years, because after a bit of "required" struggle, she generously decides to take Ben back.Apparently, this constitutes the happy end of it.The only redeeming quality of this entire, sordidly stupid affair lies in the terrific acting of its three main actors. It is so good, it makes you laugh and cry and feel along with them, in spite of being acutely aware of how embarrassingly poorly written and told a story this is, in spite of the poor technical quality of the camera work, the crappy score, the lame jokes, the bad sound, plainly said: of the really bad work everyone not named Sorbo, Swanson or Ratzenberger delivered on this project. Sorbo, at least, got a Movietime Award out of it. He should have gotten an Oscar, just for making it through it all with his usual decency.