The best way I can describe this movie is that everything is overly dramatic and sensationalized. Too many things lead to worst case scenario and everything seems forced. I'm not sure how much was writing vs directing vs acting.

There were some moments just after Grace shows up when the writing and production improved, but then it went back to the overly sensational.

This is a faith based take on the Christmas Carol and there is a heavy faith based message.

During December we are always destined to see many versions of the Charles Dickens Christmas Carol work in all kinds of variations. In By God's Grace young CEO of an air charter service Cameron Deane Stewart gets a visitation on Christmas Eve. Not three spirits as in Mr. Dickens' epic, but only one. A familiar one though, his late sister Savannah McReynolds who died as a child.

In fact she died as a child along with their parents in a car accident. While alive parents KC Guyer and Angela DiMarco raised the kids on certain biblical values like faith, hope, and charity and the certainty there's a divine plan in all this that we go through. But we do have critical choices to make. Now a lot of time those beliefs more than seem to contradict each other in real life.

So guided by McReynolds, Stewart reviews his life more like George Bailey than Ebenzer Scrooge. The parents were proud of their charitable works as much as the company that Guyer built and founded. One work was a shelter for kids and the Stewart and McReynolds interacted with the kid clients there.

What I found fascinating was the idea that Stewart became hard and cynical. It's just as likely that he become hedonistic. I found more situations like that in my personal experience than the latter.

The actors do perform well and the story within its Christian parameters is a tale well and often told.

This film is a decent Christmas story with one major message that I found thought provoking - what we do, the choices we make impacts the lives of others, either for good or for bad, whether we think so or not. What if we had the opportunity to peer into the future and see how our choices not only affect our own life, but others as well?

This film was very well acted, but I had one issue - the way the George bailey became hard, arrogant, unkind, cynical comes across as forced. It is unlikely that the tragedy he experiences could cause a complete 180 turn from the values and ways that he was raised, so it feels as though there is some missing part of the story to explain his decent into becoming a Scrooge. This is a good family film, but keep it for the 10 year old and up.