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Set in Detroit, the film is one of those multiple-narrative tales featuring a number of different subplots that eventually wind up coming together in theoretically unexpected ways—the kind of format largely developed by Robert Altman in such classics as "Nashville" and "Short Cuts," honed further by Altman acolyte Paul Thomas Anderson in his equally brilliant "Magnolia" and debased beyond belief by the atrocity that was "Crash." Here, our characters include a minister (Ted McGinley) inspired by the words of a mysterious street preacher (Delroy Lindo) carrying a massive cross, a pregnant teen runaway (Madison Pettis) that he and his barren wife (Tracy Melchior) take in, a church janitor (Brian Bosworth) who takes in a homeless mother (Mira Sorvino) and child (Makenzie Moss) while trying to disguise a cough that would give Camille pause, a born-again EMT (Liam Matthews) and his wife (Valerie Dominguez), her PTSD-suffering brother (Joseph Julian Soria), a suicidal young woman (Alexa PenaVega), an aging couple (Lee Majors and Cybil Shepherd) still reeling from the death of their daughter and a thug (Shwayze) who finds himself ready to repent for good following a robbery gone wrong.

The opening scenes establishing all these characters and their various agendas are not particularly bad. Let me rephrase that—they aren't particularly good but compared to the lunacies of "God's Not Dead," there is nothing particularly objectionable to them other than giving the other members of the thug's gang (all African-American, by the way) such names as Kriminal and 40 Ounce and the admittedly weird sight of Mira Sorvino and Brian Bosworth acting opposite each other. Having accomplished that, however, screenwriters Chuck Konzelman and Cary Solomon apparently must have worried about alienating their base because this is where the preposterous plot developments kick in. In the most grotesque of the bunch, the EMT proselytizes to a dying accident victim instead of doing his actual job and winds up being sued for everything he has by the secular humanist widow and her money-loving, religion-hating lawyer (Andrea Logan White)—since he refuses to admit that he did anything wrong, his union refuses to support him and even his wife is about to abandon him. The lawyer, by the way, is married to a cynical doctor (Sean Astin) who refuses to believe in miracles and, in one especially astonishing scene, gets irrationally upset at the sight of a couple saying grace before eating and then goes on to lamely misquote Alec Baldwin's big speech from "Malice."

As it veers between the relatively grounded and the punishingly preachy, "Do You Believe?" demonstrates that while it may not be as convulsively awful as its predecessor, it is certainly a more schizophrenic moviegoing experience. There are some moments, such as the ones involving the relationship that unexpectedly develops between the soldier and the would-be suicide, that are handled by director Jonathan M. Gunn in a reasonably touching manner (perhaps not coincidentally, this plot thread is the least overtly religious-minded of the bunch). At other times, however, it seems to be going out of its way to throw in things to fire up the base regardless of how they may work from a dramatic standpoint—characters (especially the EMT's wife) find their behavior randomly switching from scene to scene with no rhyme or reason and the runaway tells the story of how she left home because her evil stepmother tried to trick her into an abortion. The finale, in which all of the storylines finally converge (and how) is exceptionally ludicrous and by once again relying on a traffic accident help tie things up in the end, Konzelman and Solomon seem to be suggesting that if there is a God, He or She is apparently a fan of the other, better "Crash."

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