OVERCOMER

OVERCOMER is the heartwarming, wonderfully paced, as well as often very funny story of a young new track star named Hannah, who runs to Christ with the help of a basketball coach and her long-lost father.

The movie begins with a successful basketball coach losing the last game of the season. The coach, John Harrison, tries to give the team an inspirational speech, but later it’s revealed that the factory just closed, so families are steadily leaving the town to find work elsewhere, and Harrison will be losing most of his star players.

At the same time, group of youth are playing basketball outside when a girl steals a pair of headphones from one of the players. The girl, Hannah Scott, runs through the woods being chased by the boys. She hides behind a rock with her inhaler and then into her house down the hill. Her grandma scolds her for stealing and tells Hannah to return the headphones.

John is still losing players from his basketball team, and the principal recruits him to coach the cross-country team where only one girl, Hannah Scott, who stole the headphones, tries out. Refusing to coach her because of her asthma, John relents when she runs 5 kilometers in under 24 minutes. John has no clue how to coach a cross country team. However, when he goes on a visitation to a hospital with his pastor, John stumbles into the room of a blind diabetic, Thomas, who ran cross country.

John continues to train Hannah and returns to Thomas, the diabetic who is a wealth of information on cross country. As more and more people leave the basketball team, John grows frustrated. He gets into a fight with his wife, but they make up in the backyard, and all is well. Hannah finished her first race while John works through his own conflicted emotions.

John returns to the hospital to regularly receive information from Thomas, who’s a born-again believer. In a conversation with John, Thomas reveals he had a child fifteen years ago with a woman who died from a drug overdose.

When Hannah commits her life to Jesus, she tries to unravel her past.

Will Hannah, John and the others become overcomers?

OVERCOMER is a very well-produced, well-paced, emotive movie created by the Kendrick Brothers. The storytelling, acting and cinematography are superior. Some actors deliver their lines more poignantly, but in the end everyone adds significantly to the movie’s sweet, inspiring and often funny tone. Hannah’s character transformation is particularly powerful. Eventually, Hannah learns to find her identity in the Lord while navigating a host of obstacles. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is proclaimed powerfully more than once in OVERCOMER.