Plot Summary
Will Wright loves to play baseball, even if it means playing with the ‘poor kids’. Even though this gets him in trouble with his father, Will never gives up on his dream to play baseball. As he grows older, he joins the local mill league along with his ‘country’ childhood friends. But when he gets discovered by a scout, Will finds himself following the wrong crowd and doing things that go against the religion he was taught by his parents. Will he ever find his way back to the religion he grew up in?
Production Quality (1.5 points)
For Bob Jones University and Unusual Films, this is a respectable production. The camera work and video quality are pretty good, and the audio quality is okay, although the soundtrack is very annoying. Sets and locations are mostly historically authentic and fairly diverse, though since this is supposed to be an epic, there really should have been more. Also, there is far too much content that is not very useful and there are too many wasted scenes. Epics are supposed to concisely portray a period of a character’s life or the lives of a group of characters. This is definitely hard to do, but the Unusual Films crew shouldn’t have attempted this genre if they weren’t going to follow through. But all in all, this is an average production.
Plot and Storyline Quality (0 points)
The entire premise of Milltown Pride is based on a strange and over-the-top class warfare conflict between white people, and the writers do not appear to completely condemn looking down on poor people. Besides this, this films contains the usual fundamentalist and isolationist religious principles that are baked into the fiber of Bob Jones University, including creating a ‘worldly’ strawman out of sports. As previously mentioned, everything in this failed epic is dragged out and plenty of time is wasted on endless baseball sequences and juvenile conversations. The plot barely holds the attention as it follows a predictable progression with no twists and turns. The characters therein are plastic and turn people off to whatever Christian message this movie is trying to convey. In short, while this could have been interesting, it just wasn’t.
Acting Quality (0 points)
Unusual Films can’t seem to get away from casting awkward white people in their movies. This cast is very wooden and lacks proper coaching. Their emotions seem fake and their line delivery is either unsure or forced. This rounds out a mostly disappointing effort.
Conclusion
We lost count of the time a character says ‘town boy’ in this movie—it got old really fast. We are also confident that the Unusual Films crew once again just wanted another outlet to propagate their fundamentalist worldview—not that many people are paying any attention. It’s films like this one that further turn people off to the concept of Christian movies because this is what too many people think Christians are: isolated, prejudiced, backwards, fundamentalist, patriarchal white people. If we ever needed a major trend reversal, it’s now.
Final Rating: 1.5 out of 10 points
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