I Can Only Imagine 2 doubles its amount of annoying Christian rockers
What’s personal isn’t necessarily moving in the Christian-themed musical biopic I Can Only Imagine 2, a busy but lifeless follow-up to the 2018 bio-drama about singer-songwriter Bart Millard (John Michael Finley) and how he overcame adversity (an abusive dad) to write the band MercyMe’s titular multi-platinum single. Scripted, scored, and co-directed by the original movie’s screenwriter/composer Brent McCorkle, this pokey follow-up doesn’t have enough urgency or focus to sell its new father/son drama, which mostly follows Bart’s failure to connect with his teenage son Sam (Sammy Dell), as well as his own creative block during his band’s first headlining tour.
McCorkle’s scenario may be stuffed with details that resonate with its subjects and built-in evangelical audience, but they don’t translate to the screen given the movie’s tin-eared and sappy dialogue. I Can Only Imagine 2 also doesn’t have as good a story as the first movie, since it’s less about how Bart will succeed than how he’ll restore balance to his hectic life. It doesn’t help that so much of this new sequel concerns Tim Timmons (Milo Ventimiglia), a profoundly annoying new side character, also based on a Christian singer. None of this will likely be a problem for those intentionally seeking out this type of corny entertainment, but everyone else will struggle to see what they’re grooving on.
For starters, Bart’s strained ties with Sam aren’t meaningfully juxtaposed with flashbacks to his own relationship with his dismissive but ultimately born-again father (Dennis Quaid). In the previous movie, Bart struggled to connect with a man who not only hurt him and his mother, but was now dealing with a fatal cancer diagnosis. There’s nothing nearly as pressing in I Can Only Imagine 2, though they do try to make Sam’s Type 1 diabetes seem like a potentially lethal concern. But none of it, especially Bart’s helicopter-parenting, is ever that worrisome or compelling. He takes Sam on tour with him in the hopes that they can overcome what, based on an establishing scene or two, seems like standard touring-musician-dad/sullen-teen friction. Dad’s got no time to raise his kid, and that makes them both sad. The rest of the movie fails to make that low-boil tension come to a head.
It’s hard to know what really matters to Bart and Sam, despite some well-underlined concerns expressed through heartstring-yanking dialogue like, “I think God gave our kid the wrong dad,” and, “You don’t have to be perfect. Just be there for him.” Is Sam in danger? Doesn’t look like it, not beyond a scene where he collapses on stage during a dress rehearsal. So, is Bart afraid that he’s going to repeat his father’s mistakes with his own son? Not really, though he fixates on Sam’s failure to regularly check his blood sugar levels so deeply that he doesn’t really notice his kid’s budding interest in playing guitar and singing on stage with Tim Timmons.