Review: 'Redeeming Love,' a Christian-themed romance with lots of sex in it, is a stew of mixed signals and murky motives

For a drama that’s adapted from a romance novel popular with evangelical Christians, “Redeeming Love” has a lot more sexual content than you’d expect — just one of the aspects of this heavy-handed Western love story that is more confounding than enjoyable.

It’s 1850 in Pair-A-Dice, a boom town during the California gold rush. Those who have found a nugget or two of gold usually line up outside The Palace, the swankiest of the town’s brothels, to see if they win that day’s lottery. The prize: Thirty minutes with the most beautiful prostitute in the place, Angel (played by Abigail Cowen).

It wasn’t always that way, as the flashbacks show us. As a little girl (Livi Birch), Angel was witness when her mother, Mae (Nina Dobrev), was abused and discarded by the married man (Josh Taylor) who was the girl’s daddy. Mae had to take to prostitution, and died too soon of disease — leaving the girl in the not-so-tender mercies of Duke (Eric Dane), an unscrupulous gangster with brothels on both coasts.

Back to Pair-A-Dice — a pun that gets more groan-inducing with every utterance — where a godly farmer, Michael Hosea (Tom Lewis), rides into town. Before getting there, Michael has stopped into a chapel and asked God for a favor, to give him a companion to share his life. His only specific demands is that she have long legs and like fishing.

In town, Michael spots the most beautiful woman he’s ever seen, and knows she’s destined to become his wife. Yup, it’s Angel — and winning over the jaded prostitute is no easy challenge, even after getting past the brothel’s madam, Duchess (Famke Janssen), who guards Angel like the moneymaker she is.

It’s only after Angel is beaten horribly by Duchess’ goon Magowan (Brandon Auret) that Angel agrees to marry Michael. He takes her to the farm, tends to her injuries, and otherwise keeps his distance while waiting for Angel to heal from her years of trauma. Even when she offers to sleep with him, Michael demurs, saying he’ll wait until she comes to him out of love and not obligation.

Director D.J. Caruso (an action filmmaker whose last feature was the third “xXx” movie with Vin Diesel) rewrote the script by Francine Rivers, who wrote the Christian-themed novel on which it’s based, and he leans hard into the bodice-ripping elements of the historical romance genre. There are two, count ‘em, steamy sex scenes between Angel and Michael, and numerous scenes where Cowen’s Angel appears topless — though it’s “Little Mermaid” nudity, with her long hair or a stray hand covering up anything that would threaten the carefully constructed PG-13 rating.

Caruso captures the ramshackle ruggedness of the old West well (even if the movie was filmed in South Africa), and the story moves at a furious pace, particularly in the later scenes where Duke returns to the scene. 

Cowen (familiar to fans of “The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina”) is adept at playing the object of men’s lusts, and transitions well into her later role as a helpmeet who regularly abandons Michael because she feels unworthy of his devotion. It’s perhaps not surprising, considering its roots in the Old Testament — also centering on a man named Hosea — that the sexual dynamics here are all about a woman finding worthiness only in a man’s eyes.

“Redeeming Love” takes a page from “The Ten Commandments,” if only for the way Cecil B. deMille got to fill his biblical epics with copious amounts of suggestive content — and Anne Baxter in hip-hugging costumes — and get away with it, because God unleashes his wrath on the sinners in the final reel. Caruso knows he can spend plenty of time in the whorehouse, because his movie will end on the side of the angels.

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‘Redeeming Love’

★★1/2

Opening Friday, January 21, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for mature thematic content, sexual content, partial nudity, and strong violent content. Running time: 134 minutes.