Last Ounce of Courage (2012)
Subtitled “A film about family, faith and freedom”, it looks like it could just as easily replaced those three alliterative words with “conservatism, corn and crap”. Yeah, shut up: it’s not that easy. Billed as a “Christian Christmas Movie”, you know what you’re in for, and if you somehow didn’t, then the Stars and Stripes waving in your face while one man takes a stand and shakes his fist at assorted nebulous enemies of his religion will convince you. Yes, it’s that old chestnut: “they comin’ over here and takin’ our Christmas!” Or, to put it in more
South Park terms: “They took our Christmas! And our jobs!” Yeah.
The plot appears to be wafer-thin, but you can guess it anyway. One man stands up for truth, justice and the American right to celebrate Christmas against the massed hordes of ACLU-inspired liberals who want to take it away. He’s also a soldier, riding around on a motorcycle (probably a Harley, but I can neither confirm nor care) with a big American flag sticking out of its arse. You know, for once I’m going to let an actual reviewer, someone who saw the movie, explain it, as they do it so well.
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!
Rotten Tomatoes ratings
Tomatometer: 0%
Audience Score: 69%
IMDB rating
3.7/10
Metacritic rating
11
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!
A far cry from IMDB’s own synopsis of the movie, which warbles on, calling it a
“heartwarming movie”, “a beautiful story of love and forgiveness” and a movie that “inspire[s] hope, take[s] back the freedoms that are being lost and take[s] a stand for the truth.” Um, yeah. Biased much?
Other critics were more, ah, forthcoming about the movie, and there were a lot of them.
Frank Scheck of
The Hollywood Reporter thought T
his religious-themed drama about a small-town mayor's personal crusade against "the war on Christmas" is about as subtle as the character's name -- Bob Revere
Michael O’Sullivan in
The Washington Post remarked that
The sheer volume of what I like to call "eyebrow acting" -- in which thespian intensity is directly proportional to the angle and depth of one's forehead furrows -- is staggering.
While Robert Abeale in the
Los Angeles Times pointed out that
The patriot-packaged "Last Ounce of Courage" has been made with the conviction of true zealots, but also the competence of amateurs.
Living up to her name,
the World’s Megan Basham said
Though some of the language here mirrors what we often hear from the ACLU and public-school officials, Last Ounce of Courage simplifies and dumbs down their arguments to such a degree that they become ugly stereotypes rather than real people.
KC Active’s Dan Lybarger said
It's a call for the faithful to rise up if they, or any heathens who stumble in the audience, can wake from their naps or their fits of helpless unintentional laughter
Peter Sobcznski of
EFilmCritic was more direct:
America--$%#@ This!!!
The Salt Lake Tribune’s Sean Means noted
Politics aside, the hamfisted melodrama, amateurish acting, a tasteless finale and a cameo by either God or a ZZ Top cover-band refugee make "Last Ounce of Courage" laughably awful.
And Todd Jorgenson of
Cinemalogue called it like this:
It's a bait-and-switch that masquerades as inspirational drama while pushing a political agenda
Hey, at least the movie got Chuck Norris’s vote:
"It was an easy choice to endorse this film because its message is consistent with my life principles and core values.
Interestingly, though the movie made a paltry 3 million with a budget of just over one, which is not too bad a return, a court case brought against the marketing department of the movie’s producers alleging that they engaged in a robocall campaign promoting the movie, and falsely posing as a survey, cost them 32 million in damages when they lost. So while the previous movie lost more money in total, in terms of percentages, let’s see. 20 million against 90 is what, a loss of more than four times the outlay, whereas a budget of one million with a return of three is a three-fold profit, but then taking that 3 million and having to give back 32, you’re looking at over ten times the loss. So this movie in the end far outstripped the hugely loss-making
Nutcracker 3D in terms of profit to loss ratio.
Hey! Maybe there
is a God!
