Unsung Hero comes at a time when Christian films have become a rarity in Hollywood. Since the financial downturn at Pure Flix Entertainment, we have not gotten many genuine Christian films over the last four or five years.
In the mid to late 2010s, a series of well-crafted Christian movies were released that served as a good palate cleanser to the typical Hollywood production.
Recently, Pure Flix ended up selling to Sony in a move that many feared would be the death of Christian movies — and it was for quite some time until last year’s partnership with Great American Family, which has the brand poised for a comeback. There is another studio, however, that has more recently been friendly to Christian content: Lionsgate.
While last year’s Jesus Revolution found favor at the box office, there was one troubling trend that many moviegoers noticed. As major studios have begun to profit off of the Christian genre, there has been a noticeable lack of Christ in many of these movies.
How can an industry — known for making people contractually refrain from saying the name of Jesus Christ — put out a faithful film about the Christian faith? The answer is they can’t — unless you bring together creative minds who want to bring Christ back into Christian films.
Fortunately, many people were willing to do that with Unsung Hero; the real-life story about the Smallbone family. Originally from Australia, the patriarch of the family, David Smallbone, was a music promoter in the late 1980s who managed to link himself with many successful artists.
After an economic downturn brings the entertainment industry of Australia to a screeching halt, however, David finds himself in desperate need of a gig at the risk of losing everything that he owns. David decides to take an opportunity in the United States that requires him to move with his wife and their seven kids from their comfortable mansion in Australia to a small home in Nashville.
Things only manage to get worse when David finds out that his job opportunity has fallen through only after his family has moved to the other side of the world. With nothing left and no one willing to give him another chance, the Smallbone family is forced to do jobs to survive with the little they have left.
When everything has been taken away from them, they realize that the one thing that they can rely on is their faith in Christ and their family — it is that rock that allows them to propel forward in a way that no one could have imagined.
Unsung Hero is a cinematic sledgehammer to the overflowing sea of nihilism that pours out of Hollywood every year — a breath of fresh air that is such a polar opposite to the sea of death, brutality, and degeneracy Hollywood produces that audiences may end up finding something they have not gotten out of a movie in quite some time: joy.
The film is a family affair in which Joel Smallbone plays his father David in the movie. It is about the rise of his older sister Rebecca St. James and his band ‘for KING & COUNTRY’. A family that has everything in another country is forced into taking the ultimate risk by moving to the United States for a new start and watching everything go wrong along the way.
Unsung Hero is all about family, which may be off-putting to those who don’t have a good relationship with their own. However, the film puts the focus on not the material things you own but on those you have in your life; the ones who stick by your side.
The story can be viewed as too crazy to be true if it didn’t happen. The film shows the struggle of the family, as David is so down on his luck that he views himself as a failure for being unable to provide the best life for them. But the strength of this movie is the mother played by Daisy Betts, who is the true representation of a strong woman, keeps her family together and their faith strong.
Unsung Hero‘s one flaw of the film is that it gives an exposé inside of the Christian contemporary music business, which you discover in the film that isn’t much different than the secular music business and how it operates.
The film focuses on the climb before the rise of this famous family, meaning that it omits their lives after securing their first record deal. This allows the movie to stay focused on the central story and not have it be a musical biopic. If you’re looking for a film that covers the more musical aspects of the family you will be disappointed.
For those wondering how true the faith aspect of this movie is, Unsung Hero gives a window into the Smallbone’s strong relationship with God through prayer without using scripture, as quoting the Bible tends to anger secular critics.
As a Christian movie, the film’s strengths lie in preaching the power of prayer and the power of community of those in your life that help you when you are in need — even if that means our protagonist has to break down his ego to realize that it’s become a detriment to his own family.
Unsung Hero gives a satisfying and upbeat conclusion that can only be viewed as one of the biggest cinematic white pills of 2024. One of the best feel-good movies of the year and, looking ahead at the schedule, it’s going to be one of the few movies of its kind, so it is worth checking out whenever you can.