Broken Victory

My review was written in April 1988 after watching the movie on video cassette.

"Broken Victory" is a rathr flat sci-fi parable about a dystopia of the future where religious Christians are being persecuted and forced to give up their faith. Well-meaning effort fails to scintilate or shed new light on a familiar theme of speculative fiction.

Central characters comprise a Christian family hounded by the evil Colonel (Jon Sharp) to relinquish their faith or face death, with the kids used and abused by the state to put pressure on their stubborn elders. Subplots are mainly of the soap opera variety and fail to idie a serious absence of plot development in Gregory Strom and Jonathan Smith's one-note screenplay.

It is easy to identify with this clan led by matriarch Jeannette Clift, but film does not sketch in details of how the future/parallel society works. The religious persecution theme is a universal one, but absence of an interesting story line or imaginative futuristic trappings reduces the film to the level of unfounded paranoia.

In particular, a scene of the Colonel spitting on and burning a bible is meant to conjure up the loss of freedom embodied in "Fahrenheit 451", yet without a specific context the viewer cannot tell if this is a liberation work or merely propaganda from the fundamentalist right.

Production has a threadbare look and lacks action. Cast is adequate.

The micro budget feature film, Broken Victory, is an excellent entry into the faith-based genre. Starring Golden Globe and BAFTA Award Nominee, Jeannette Clift ("The Hiding Place"), the story centers around one family's struggle to keep their faith in a world governed by a One-World General. The acting is uniformly good with stand-outs, Cheryl Slean and John Shephard, delivering particularly strong performances. For anyone who wishes there were more Christian-themed films, this is definitely one to see.