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03/10/07
The Ultimate Gift (2007)
32
%
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:56
Fresh:18
Rotten:38
Average Rating:5.1/10
Consensus: Though The Ultimate Gift avoids religious speechifying like other Fox Faith films, it's dramatically inert with flat direction.
Runtime: 1 hr 58 mins
Genre: Dramas
Synopsis: The videotaped will of deceased billionaire Red Stevens (James Garner) includes the "ultimate gift" for his spoiled, sullen grandson Jason (Drew Fuller). A series of tasks meant to turn Jason from... [More]
Starring: Drew Fuller, James Garner, Ali Hillis, Abigail Breslin
Director: Michael O. Sajbel
Reviews for The Ultimate Gift
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04/23/09
Christian charity, in this movie, seems like a side-effect of capitalism.
03/17/07
Director Michael O. Sajbel too often succumbs to movie-of-the-week sentimentality and starchy pacing.
03/08/07
Veterans Garner and Brian Dennehy give convincing professional performances here, but Fuller is bland.
03/17/07
Often meanders into Hallmark territory.
02/06/07
It's Self-Help: The Movie, and it stinks to high heaven.
08/21/07
You have to wonder why anyone might be interested in this ridiculously contrived and sappy story.
03/06/07
The film preaches a familiar message of valuing people over material possessions, but the past moralizing and contrived plot result in a tedious longwinded work that's like a Sunday-school lecture.
03/06/07
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.
03/17/07
Truly awful filmmaking, informed not by real life but by old movies, savages the story's generally honorable and positive themes
03/09/07
Relentlessly sappy and predictable...this may go over well as a public service announcement but as a roughly clocked two-hour movie it feels both tepid and tedious.
03/09/07
The predictabilities of the story line might be forgivable if they had been rendered more entertainingly, but the overlong proceedings have been staged in an utterly pedestrian fashion.
03/09/07
Top CriticIf one learns by suffering, as grandpa keeps saying here, this movie offers a good deal of instruction.
03/08/07
The Ultimate Gift is kind of like a feel-good Saw for churchgoers, minus the sadistic games of death.
03/14/07
Has a mercifully light hand in selling its Christian-values themes, but its plodding story about a spoiled young scion who must complete 12 tasks assigned him by his late grandfather is still a slog.
03/09/07
Reeking of self-righteousness and moral reprimand, The Ultimate Gift is a hairball of good-for-you filmmaking.
03/09/07
Top CriticIf The Ultimate Gift really wanted to embrace a powerful Christian message, it would've made Jason's ordeal truly threatening and genuinely transformative.
03/09/07
Director Michael O. Sajbel and screenwriter Cheryl McKay try to stuff so much of Jim Stovall's novel in that it feels a bit rushed.
03/08/07
Well-meant, but impossibly obvious.
03/08/07
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