Movie Review: The Lost Medallion

Rating: Great
Suggested Ages: 9+

The Lost Medallion is an exciting, energetic, relatively family-friendly kids movie that is fun to watch and also manages to instill some positive messages. It's got kind of a "Princess Bride" meets "Indiana Jones" type feel to it, though this is definitely aimed more at kids rather than adults. Alex Kendrick (of Fireproof and Courageous fame) stars as a guy that basically gets drafted into telling a bunch of foster kids a story. Realizing some of the kids' feelings and issues, he uses some of their names to tell his story. Once the story starts, the movie goes into that story and occasionally comes back to Kendrick and the kids before jumping back into the story (a la Princess Bride). The story itself is a fun and exciting tale about a lost medallion and its magical power to grant wishes that an evil man is trying to get to control the world - but a group of kids come to the rescue. Lessons about friendship, sacrifice, service, worth (to God and to others), and more are in abundance.

In real life, I just had a foster kid tell me recently basically that he was junk because he was an accident to his parents. As I was watching this film, a child in it says a similar thing and one of the characters responds with something along the lines of "you may have been an accident to your parents, but you were not an accident to God - He loves you." May sound like kind of a corny line, but you know what? It's true and actually is fairly similar to how I responded to the kid that was talking with me. I have found a lot of kids these days in particular believe they are junk or trash (and will even vocalize this outloud about themselves), so it's kind of nice to have a movie like this that seeks to counter that.

I will say that there is a bit of violence, and there are deaths that occur in this film (nothing gory), so I would say it's too intense for young children. There also are a few scenes that bothered me such as one where a car seemingly crashes/explodes and the kids laugh at that happening, and some of the dialog/messages were of the more Disneyish "believe in yourself/trust your heart" type stuff rather than substantive Christianity. Being a child of the 80's, it kind of reminded me in some vague ways of things like the new-agey "The Neverending Story". As I was watching, I kind of had the impression I was basically watching a generic kids adventure film that later had a more-overt Christian wrap-around component with Alex Kendrick added. And indeed it turns out that's more or less the case. The film was originally filmed in 2009 and it didn't get the Alex Kendrick treatment and subsequent changes until much later - the film didn't get released until 2013 - basically 4 years after original filming. But it still manages to "work" relatively well and while there's some "problematic" dialog/content, I would say that it generally is overshadowed by the positive.

Production quality was quite strong, especially considering this was a relatively "low budget" film. There's some absolutely beautiful scenery and some ok special effects - I'm glad this was released on Blu-ray. Acting was reasonable - some were better than others, but overall was fine for this type of film. There is some notable talent in this film.

All in all, this could be a decent family night movie for kids 9/10 and up.

Reviewed by Christopher Long,
BodEquip Ministries