In the new action-adventure The Reliant, former Hercules Kevin Sorbo continues his Christ-like resurrection/Road to Calvary as a “faith-friendly” movie star, playing the patriarch of a family that finds itself driven into the woods after the collapse of the U.S. dollar sparks violent mass riots. “Facing starvation and threats from encroaching gangs, they begin to doubt God’s love. Upon whom will they be reliant?” asks the film’s fundraising page, an awkwardly phrased existential question to which the movie provides the obvious, American answer: a gun. And now The Reliant wants to give you one!
As part of the promotional effort for this self-described “pro-Second Amendment, faith-based action movie,” producer and screenwriter J.P. Johnston is giving away his very own personal AR-15 assault rifle to one lucky winner who will be selected on Christmas Day, birthday of our other savior. To properly arm yourself for our own impending societal collapse, all you have to do is correctly answer four of five questions about the film careers of Kevin Sorbo and his co-stars Brian “Boz” Bosworth and Eric Roberts. Which is, to be fair, a slightly bigger hurdle than most people face buying assault rifles, even taking into account that you can just get the answers from the movie’s Facebook page.
Of course, there is something, let us say, faith-testing about someone holding an open lottery for an assault rifle—the exact same one that’s seen in the film’s trailer, fired recklessly into the sky by actor Blake Burt as he screams, “It’s God’s fault!”—as a means of trying to “promote responsible gun ownership.”
It is also, perhaps, a tad unseemly to be advertising a faith-based film by raffling off the same kind of weapon that most recently slaughtered more than two dozen people at a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, wielded by an unlicensed man who clearly had his own problems with God. And there is definitely something ironic about a fervently anti-gun control movie reaffirming the need for it by just dropping semi-automatics in the mail to random winners of internet quizzes. But hey, it’s not as though the producers of The Reliant can just share God’s love with everyone—and besides, as the movie’s gospel tells us, what good is that anyway? Get yourself a gun!
[via Fast Company]