Courageous

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COURAGEOUS

Honour begins at home

Sherwood Pictures

Director: Alex Kendrick

This is the fourth film from independent Christian filmmakers, Sherwood Pictures, creators of Facing the Giants and Fireproof. And they are on the up with now both Sony and Tristar involved in producing the film.

It is a movie with a message for men, especially fathers. The plot revolves around the lives of four officers who work for the Albany police department in Georgia. From the kick-off, there are well-worked action sequences and car chases as the police set out to stop drug dealing in their city. It is then that tragedy strikes and one of the officers is caused to reflect on the increasing distance between himself and his teenaged son. Others of his colleagues are also facing various marriage and family issues. With the statistic ringing in his ears that fatherless children are far more likely to turn to lives of crime, the officer digs deeply into what the Bible has to say about fatherhood. There is a good mix of humour and pathos, ethnicities and family problems, and the plot unfolds and lives begin to change as the central character shares what the Bible has taught him.

While others were invited to get involved, about half the cast are volunteers from Sherwood Baptist Church. Set in the US Bible belt, there is an assumption of church-going and a Christianised culture. This can be refreshing for us who live in super-secularised Britain. Some will feel that it makes the story a little ‘cheesy’.

It cost about $2 million to make, but over the weekend of its release last September in America it netted some $9 million. There is a market for family-friendly films and I think that is what Sony and Tristar must have realised. Whether you will ever see this film available at a UK cinema is debatable. But it is out on DVD.