Movie Review: The Lost Medallion

Rating: Great
Suggested Ages: 10+

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. 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.

I will say that there is a degree of violence, and there are deaths that occur in this film, 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 new-agey "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 had a Christian wrap-around component with Alex Kendrick added later. And indeed it turns out that was exactly 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 relatively decent - some were better than others. There is some notable talent in this film.

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

Reviewed by Christopher Long,
BodEquip Ministries