Rent Courageous (2011)

Courageous review by Melissa Orcine - Cinema Paradiso

Adam Mitchell (Alex Kendrick) is an Albany police officer and father of two young children, a boy and a girl. But he’s more focused on fulfilling his police duties instead of being a ‘good’ father. When his daughter suddenly dies, Adam promises to do better with his remaining child. And as he goes on being a police officer with three others from the force and a Hispanic carpenter, they not only roam the streets and protect the innocent, they also want them to have faith in the Lord.

This is the movie ‘Courageous’, a religious movie produced by Sherwood Pictures, a movie production company of the Sherwood Baptist Church.

Although ‘Courageous’ is about the power of Christian faith, it is also about fathers who want to be responsible not just for their family but others. And just because it’s a religious movie doesn’t mean it has no action sequences (the main cast are comprised of cops.) There are competent shots of foot chase sequences and guns firing, these should be in there as police officers don’t just drive and hang around in their patrol cars the entire day.

Brothers Alex and Stephen Kendrick (as co-writers; with Alex as star and director, and Stephen as producer) have a capable hand at filming male interactions, especially among policemen, and have an eye on inserting little unexpected action sequences. They falter at plot and dialogue, though. They can’t seem to get away from being preachy and even evangelizing its audience. Granted, it knows its audience – the members of Sherwood Baptist Church – but it wouldn’t hurt if the film makers went out of their way to include the rest of the movie-viewing public.

‘Courageous’ harps on the ideal of fathers being responsible but how to achieve this is quite confusing. To begin with, parenting styles differ from each other and if you base raising your children by believing in Jesus Christ, how about the rest who aren’t Christians? Are they not good enough fathers because their God is not Jesus? Hopefully, the movie’s audience will be more open-minded when clearly, the movie is not.