Hillary Swank rallies her entire town to help out a neighbor in the latest trailer for Lionsgate’s true-life faith-based drama “Ordinary Angels.”
The two-time Oscar winner plays a hairdresser who inserts herself into the life of a grieving widower (Alan Ritchson, from “Reacher” and “Fast X”) with a critically ill daughter. The kid needs a new liver, and the dad just needs a little help. As revealed in the trailer, circumstances change when a new organ becomes available for transplant, but it requires a cross-country flight and happens to occur during a once-in-a-generation cold front.
Swank won two Best Actress Oscars, one in 2000 for “Boys Don’t Cry” and one in 2005 for “Million Dollar Baby.” Although she never really became a bankable draw, she has made a career out of mostly top-billed leading roles in films like “Amelia,” “The Core” and “The Gift.” Moreover, she almost never found herself just playing the love interest or the lone woman in a macho melodrama, a rarity for any actress then and now.
“Ordinary Angels” is the latest in Lionsgate’s ongoing run of aspirational, upworthy, comparatively inclusive faith-based flicks. Think “The Shack,” “I Can Only Imagine” and “Jesus Revolution,” these are films that practice essentially “Veggie Tales”-style Christianity. They also, like some of Sony’s mid-2010s offerings like “Soul Surfer,” Heaven is For Real” and “Miracles from Heaven,” double as the kind of old-school, star-driven, non-franchise studio programmer that used to be Hollywood’s bread and butter.
This film, opening in theaters on October 13, is directed by Jon Gunn, who previously helmed “The Case for Christ” and “Do You Believe?” However, it is written by actress Meg Tilly and Kelly Femon Craig, the latter of which wrote and directed both “The Edge of Seventeen” and “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.” In some cases, faith-based drama is a safe space not just for faith-based cinema but also for filmmakers and actors to just make comparatively old-fashioned, non-franchise, non-IP movies.
