For around 100 of its 105 minutes, director/co-writer Alejandro Monteverde’s period drama seems like it might be one of the more daring entries into the recent wave of faith-based filmmaking … and then. In a coastal California town circa 1945, diminutive 8-year-old Pepper Busbee (Jakob Salvati) is devastated when his beloved father (Michael Rappaport) heads off to serve in the Army, but becomes convinced through a combination of his favorite comic-book magician (Ben Chaplin) and the local priest (Tom Wilkinson) that he might have within him the ability to bring Dad home safely. What follows involves Pepper’s reluctant befriending of the town’s lone, ostracized Japanese-American resident (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa), and Monteverde begins to build a potentially fascinating, emotionally potent theology around the idea that faith is at its most potent because of what it changes inside the believer. But (striving here to be spoiler-free), he buckles to the most cowardly and pandering resolution imaginable, undermining everything the rest of the movie had developed so effectively. The result is savvy, but shallow: Monteverde may end up selling more tickets, but he won’t change any souls. By Scott Renshaw