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If you missed the money-isn’t-everything message, an end-credits recap outlines the story’s salient points -- if you’d known, you could’ve skipped the rest.

[James] Garner is good, and so is Brian Dennehy as a crusty ranch owner; Abigail Breslin, playing a leukemia patient, demonstrates that she was not a one-note wonder in Little Miss Sunshine.

Pretty much what one would expect: a sincere story of redemption delivered with all the low-key execution of one of those Hallmark-backed TV movies of the week.

The Ultimate Gift is kind of like a feel-good Saw for churchgoers, minus the sadistic games of death.

Wholesome and inspirational, it preaches a simplistic "prosperity gospel."

It is message filmmaking so blunt you might be tempted to root for the parasitic reprobate over the saintly old man, and that's just not right.

If The Ultimate Gift really wanted to embrace a powerful Christian message, it would've made Jason's ordeal truly threatening and genuinely transformative.

If anything, the film's uplifting moral tone seems more in line with a Frank Capra flick than a cinematic sermon.

It does telegraph its sentiments with all the subtlety of a greeting card.