‘Unsung Hero’: God Himself Can’t Save This Uninspiring Faith-Based Drama
“I know what I believe,” says Rebecca Smallbone (Kirrilee Berger), a teenager defending her ability to write and sing pop songs, about halfway through the biopic Unsung Hero.
The audience has to more or less take her word for it, because while she will eventually become the Christian pop star Rebecca St. James, Unsung Hero doesn’t focus enough on Rebecca to give anyone a sense of her thoughts or feelings on much of anything. We’re left to assume that she simply shares most of her beliefs with the true subjects of the film: her parents, David and Helen. In the tradition of King Richard, where Will Smith played the cantankerous, determined, high-standards father of Venus and Serena Williams, the next step in biopic evolution apparently involves paying tribute to the parents who figure so prominently in certain success stories. This seems like a particularly appealing tactic for a faith-based movie like Unsung Hero. Call it Fifth Commandment Cinema.
Unsung Hero is Fifth Commandment Cinema without the benefit of Will Smith-level charisma to make the stubbornness and screw-ups go down easier. What it lacks in star power, it makes up for in astonishing levels of faux-piety and false modesty: Joel Smallbone, of the Christian musical act For King & Country, co-writes and co-directs a biopic starring himself, playing his dad David. As the movie tells it, David follows his dream as a Christian music promoter and, after taking a bath on an early-'90s Amy Grant tour (blamed vaguely on “the economy”), uproots the family and moves them to the United States to start a new record label with another artist. When they arrive, David learns that the deal has fallen through. Now the family is stranded in Nashville with a six-month visa, no jobs, and plenty of pressure to head back to Australia. David doesn’t want to give up, but he’s also not sure what to do next.