The Forge (Blu-ray Review)
I’ll just admit it here, first sentence – I sort-of despise faith-based movies. I’m not deeply religious, and my love of gospel music is about the extent of my spirituality. Even that’s a slim margin in my opinion. The Kendrick Brothers have cornered the market for these types of films, making modestly budgeted Godly faire with decent box office returns. The Forge, according to the press releases and Blu-ray box art will let you know is the 5th A+ Cinemascore rated film from the brothers. Does that warrant a positive notice from this writer? Find out below and have faith that I do, you could help me with my rating that way!
Film 
Isaiah Wright has some growing up to do. A year out of high school with no plans for his future, Isaiah is challenged by his single mom and a successful businessman to start charting a better course for his life. Through the prayers of his mother and biblical discipleship from his new mentor, Isaiah begins to discover God’s purpose for his life is so much more than he could hope for or imagine. From the Kendrick Brothers, the creators of the No. 1 hit WAR ROOM, comes THE FORGE, a faith-filled new movie with old friends and inspiring new twists.
When we first meet our young protagonist Isaiah, he is more in tune with video games and basketball with his friends than with growing up. Just 19, Isaiah skated through school and has no job. His single mother, fed up with her son’s inability to wake up early or put the controller down declares that she can’t take it anymore and asks the Lord for help. On his own, Isaiah decides it may be time to look for a job. He happens upon Moore Fitness looking for a job. When he meets the CEO, he is offered a job since the CEO knows Isaiah’s uncle and helped him similarly once upon a time.
Isaiah of course drops the ball immediately, coming to work late, staying up gaming and forgetting his door badge. He is a disappointment just based on his desire to do less in life than his struggling mother or some of his peers. When the CEO, Joshua Moore decides to delve deeper to reach Isaiah, he does so by preaching the word of God. Isaiah’s mother is also religious, finding herself praying at work, at the hair salon and anywhere anyone will pray with her, but it’s Joshua who somehow reaches Isaiah faith senses. From here, Isaiah begins to straighten his life out, invited by Joshua to join The Forge, a group of “disciples” who get together regularly to have a meal, pray, touch a mythical sword and discuss the good word.
After attending his first Forge meeting, Isaiah openly admits his obsession with gaming and vows to God to change. He pawns his gaming equipment, deletes some questionable materials from his phone and begins to take care of his responsibilities at home and his new job. His mother, so impressed restores Isaiah’s long-gone father’s old Mustang to show her pride to him with a gift. It’s all so touching. But is it though?
I went into The Forge with a bit of a chip on my shoulder. I will say that I was never pressured with religion growing up. I was raised Catholic and as a young child we went to church on Sundays. But nothing like bible study, Sunday school or even Catechism came my way. My mother was raised in Catholic church and school and as we grew up she told us she didn’t want to beat us over the head with religion like she felt she had been growing up. I appreciate this, because it allowed me to form my own views on faith, to which I feel I have some heretic ideals, taking the good from various religions and operating on faith rather than religious figures. It may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but for me it works. As you know, I try to find ways to relate to the films I review, and even with my chipped shoulder, I tried with this film.
The Forge is presented as an aggressive film ministry for people who may themselves feel lost in their lives. The film begins as an extremely generic, almost made-for-TV film. It would play great on that Great American Family network. The wooden acting, the stop for long passages to pray moments, the forced messages, and even the bombardment of “join us for Jesus” that happens to Isaiah with everyone he encounters makes the film feel almost cult-like to me. As the film slow crawls through its two-hours, I was nearly ready to yell at the screen – “Get out of this movie, kid!”
I know there’s certainly an audience for a film like this. Just like there was an audience for Terrifier 3, or Wicked, or Gladiator II – Heck, there was an audience for Freddie Got Fingered 25 years ago. But the audience for The Forge is not me. I rolled my eyes a lot, I wished the Christian rap songs in the film were mainstream because the music sounded good, and the emotional push towards the end, with a bunch of preaching and crying and hands in the air just rubbed me the wrong way. Fans of the faith-based film will no doubt love this one, but I will likely place this as the worst movie I have seen in 2024. The forced messages and banal premise already put me off the film, but worse still the fact that a very skewed panel of test audience filmgoers loved it enough to give it a perfect score kind of blows my mind. I hope the audience out there for The Forge does love the film. I also wish I could get my two hours back… So, there’s that. Maybe I’ll pray on it.
Video: 
Encoding: MPEG-4 AVC
Resolution: 1080p
Aspect Ratio: 2.39:1
HDR: N/A
Layers: BD-50
Clarity/Detail: The Forge debuts on Blu-ray from Sony looking just as we have come to know from the company. Textures, colors, clarity and detail shine through, despite the often drab set pieces in the film. Warehouse floors, home interiors, outdoor scenes and close ups on actors all look more than fine overall.
Depth: Bland camera work shines here, bringing out details as the camera moves around actors and sets, with nothing looking out of place or odd.
Color Reproduction: Colors look natural and pitch perfect.
Black Levels: Blacks are handled without flaw throughout.
Flesh Tones: Flesh tones are accurate and on point.
Noise/Artifacts: Clean
Audio
Audio Format(s): English, French, Spanish DTS-HD MA 5.1, English Descriptive Audio Dolby Digital 5.1
Subtitles: English, English SDH, French, Spanish
Dynamics: A decent 5.1 lossless track accompanies The Forge. The film doesn’t have a lot of loud moments, with a lot of the runtime going towards sermonized moments, tearful drama and the occasional bass heavy Christian rap tune. Surround activity is minimal with dialogue easy to hear throughout.
Height: N/A
Low-Frequency Extension: Bass is saved for the Christian rap songs that play in moments of the film. Score and reach for the subwoofer for a fleeting moment too.
Surround Sound Presentation: Surrounds activity is sparse, catching an echo or two and some ambience in scenes outside or in the fitness equipment factory.
Dialogue Reproduction: Clear.
Extras
Extras on the disc for The Forge should please whomever is a fan of the film. The disc comes in a standard Blu-ray case with a digital code. No slipcover or bundled DVD is included.
Special Features:
- The Making of The Forge
- Commentary by The Kendrick Brothers
- Discipleship in The Forge
- The Heart of The Forge
- Bloopers
- Deleted Scenes
- Follow-Up Resource Guide
Summary
Yes, I certainly and admittedly had a huge block up going into The Forge. Watching the whole film, my block feels warranted. The film had no value to me as a movie fan. I was not entertained and felt that a film like this could work for the deeply religious but would somehow turn off others. When a film based on faith is done right, you can look past those religious ideals and find something to educate and entertain yourself with. This is not that film. It felt for lack of a better word preachy, and represents the kind of religion that, for me anyway, scares me about deeply religious people. The audience for this movie would not understand my disdain for it, and I likely wouldn’t understand their deep connection to God or Jesus either. In the end, I guess we will just have to let those who like films like this like them happily, while those of us who don’t will just watch better films.
If so desired, purchase your copy of The Forge HERE
Adam Toroni-Byrne
Adam is a lifelong physical media collector. His love of collecting began with a My First Sony radio and his parent's cassette collection. Since the age of 3, Adam has collected music on vinyl, tape and CD and films on VHS, DVD, Blu-ray and UHD Blu-ray. Adam likes to think of himself as the queer voice of Whysoblu. Outside of his work as a writer at Whysoblu, Adam teaches preschool and trains to be a boxer although admittedly, he's not very good.
