Last Ounce of Courage

Honestly, I do not know why I bothered. If you have any appreciation for film, you will avoid this propaganda. Even if you support the message, which I generally do, you should at least give it an honest rating. Rating a low budget, poorly written, poorly acted, poorly directed film as high as Casablanca or Citizen Cane is a travesty. It is just plane WRONG. That being said, how could any intelligent person trust the truthfulness of the film's message if it is so blatantly wrapped in lies and deceit by the so-called "reviewers"? Al Qaeda techniques by those who claim to appose them. I struggled with the rating I chose, because my initial thought was to vote it a 1 in order to help balance the skewed ratings, but I didn't. That would be basically the same crime. No matter how those who falsely inflated the rating feel about the message, as a film it is still just plain bad.

Why do people insist on leaving fake reviews. Pages of reviews within a week giving higher ratings than some of the classic movies of all time, yet the overall score is 3.8.

Well I don't have anything to do with the film, am not American and am an atheist, and when I watched it I thought it was awful.

As film from a complete neutral it was terrible, patronising and laughable.

The film deserves to be on some Z-grade cable channel on a Wednesday afternoon.

Fortunately the scoring on IMDb shows the true picture, its a terrible low budget movie with nothing to warrant a viewing.

If you've seen the trailer for Last Ounce of Courage, then you know the roots and the morals of the entire picture. Some films like to persuade the audience down a different direction and have them possess a different idea of the film in their trailers. Not this one. This film blatantly comes out and tells you what it is, what it strives to be, and what lies behind its morality and its filmmakers' cores all in the trailer. It's one of the most unsubtle films I've seen in years.

Let me give you an idea of how patriotic this film is; in the one minute and fifty-one second trailer I counted fifteen shots where the American flag was clearly visible, thirteen of them in the first minute. There's also an unintentionally corny sequence of Marshall R. Teague's character riding a motorcycle, draped in leather apparel, and proudly letting the American flag flow in the wind of the air. There's nothing particularly wrong with that, but as a whole, this is another tired, worn entry in the almost hopeless genre of American cinema, and when I say "American cinema," I mean cinema that comes from this country boasting nationalism and simple, earnest, life-affirming values. See Broken Bridges and Seven Days in Utopia for schooling in the field.

We begin on an offbeat note that could've been keenly directed into passable territory with development and humanity. The first character we see is Thomas Revere, a man who has a patriotic father named Bob (Marshall R. Teague), a loving mother (Jennifer O'Neill), a young wife (Nikki Novak), and a young son on the way. He enlists in the war to fight for his country, like his father did, and writes letters and sends videos back to his wife and infant son during his deployment. Later on, in the middle of a normal day, Thomas's mom is greeted by the sight of two military men, in uniform, with an American flag and a wreath on her doorstep. Thomas's wife is now a widower with a young child. If this happened twenty minutes into the picture, and we had more development and interest in the character of Thomas, having him die would be a monumentally depressing plot-point. To have him die minutes after meeting him leaves the viewer emotionally deprived when it should leave us emotionally drained.

We move several years later, where Thomas's son Christian (whether the name is supposed to be coincidental or unintentional I can't say), played by Hunter Gomez, is a bright and curious fourteen year old boy, who is suddenly interested in all that has happened to his father, as if a fatherless kid never asked his mother just what happened to daddy. He digs through an old chest of his grandfather's to try and find more facts about him, and gets his family to watch old videos of Thomas's love letters to his mother.

Then we take the incredibly abrupt topic of how Christmas has become a greatly limited holiday in the states, what with political correctness and the recognition of other holidays around the same time. Bob, who is the mayor of the small town of Mount Columbus, is sickened at how America has neglected the fact that Christmas is a national holiday, and while it isn't celebrated by every American in the country, it should nonetheless be recognized and we should have the broad freedom to wish people a "Merry Christmas" without being scolded for arrogance.

I've noticed a barrage of online reviewers claiming those who will hate this movie are liberals and that's because they are not true Americans. I'm not so sure about that. I consider myself a hardcore Libertarian, who has an immense amount of pride and respect for the United States, possesses a large amount of individualist opinions, and shares the same views as Bob on the idea of Christmas; we live in America, and saying "Merry Christmas" on Television or in public schools shouldn't be the big deal that it is. I'm living proof you can share the same opinion as the filmmakers and not be a fan of the film.

The main reason is for the heavy-handedness of the topic at hand, and the complete bleeding heart, Christian-Conservative propaganda that becomes nauseatingly obvious and brutally contrived throughout the whole film. This is a picture that completely shortchanges character relations and depth in order to promote its ideology. It features capable acting by Marshall R. Teague and Hunter Gomez, but uninspired, wooden performances from the majority of its actor, and screenwriter that ultimately could pass for a heavily biased lecture.

I suppose my main quibble with the film is that it makes an issue out of something that is so petty and foolish in real life that seeing a film pound in the morals and someone's biased ideology of the event makes it just as painful to listen to. I respect the filmmakers involved, I wouldn't object to watching other films by them, and I feel that with great material, they could all work wonders. But to make a ninety-eight minute film that does nothing more than paint an oppressive picture of an opinion held by the people involved, and utilize it as an attack for anyone on the opposite side of the coin is a colossal miscalculation in terms of a way going about an argument and in terms of filmmaking.

Starring: Marshall R. Teague, Jennifer O'Neill, Fred Williamson, Nikki Novak, Hunter Gomez, and Jenna Boyd. Directed by: Darrel Campbell and Kevin McAfee.

This movie has come back in the news namely because the court case where Mike Huckabee robocalled everybody to promote this movie finally was decided and the makers need to pay out some $32 million dollars in damages. That's a little more than $10.00 per person though but it made me remember this movie all over again.

This takes place in an America that never was. It's an America where kids aren't allowed to bring bibles to school. There's never been any law like this on the books except you can't read from the bible in class nor can you teach the bible instead of actual history or science. It's a world where you can't have Christmas decorations anywhere. It's a world where kids never heard of Christmas carols because they don't play them on the radio anymore. In short, this is not happening anywhere in this country.

But that never stopped people with an agenda from pushing it and acting like they're the persecuted minority when last time I checked just about everybody in this country celebrates Christmas to one degree or another.

It's badly acted, poorly produced and has elements in it that simply aren't true no matter how much the makers want it to be true.

Avoid this unless you happen to like that kind of thing. Or even better, try to find a real Christmas movie if you're in the mood for one.

This movie is a Fox News viewer's wet dream: factually inaccurate, racially insensitive, and wallowing in manufactured Christian persecution and martyrdom. We're so oppressed! We are only allowed to have our Christmas decorations prominently displayed in our homes and places of worship. They are stripping us of our right to force everyone in the country to acknowledge our religion too!

The guys at God Awful Movies podcast put it best: Will America Freedom Jesus? Will Jesus Freedom America? Will Freedom Freedom Freedom? Find out the Jesus to America Questions and Freedom, when we Jesus back for act Freedom of America America Jesus!