PROS
+ Excellent actors (with the exception of the cameraman ...).
+ Great plot, except the inclusion of Afghanistan, which was only to dramatize the movie, but didn't fit at all.
+ Mostly sound theology.
+ A movie lifting up the value of women. It does a great job in reflecting on unhealthy, and sometimes even criminal behaviors and practices of men of status and power.
CONS
- The movie is partly idealized and far away from reality. A women who killed someone in order to prevent a rape may indeed be set free under certain circumstances, but she still has to repent of that act before the LORD. The movie rather celebrated her, which is not right. It should have included spiritual repentance, because her acts -although in self-defense- went against the teachings of the Bible to exchange violence for violence.
- In one scene, the female judge gives her husband a trolley as a Christmas present and sends him after 40 years of marriage out of the house. He abused her verbally which was painful to watch, but such a thing does not justify a divorce as suggested in the movie. This lesson is therefore strictly anti-biblical, no matter how good it might feel to the viewer when seeing justice done.
- While the music is good, the timing and selection for the scenes is terrible. It is often totally disconnected from the mood of the respective scene. It seems as if they got a stock of songs and then just spread them evenly over the movie.
In one scene there is joyful music while an old man falls out of his hospital bed. A few minutes later, we hear again joyful music while a dead body is examined.
- The last song she performed in the church was also not synchronized at all to her performance.
