End of the Spear: Critic Reviews

It's an ooga-booga movie dressed in 'anthropological' empathy.

This fact-based story of conflict and resolution between a primitive warrior tribe in Ecuador and peace-seeking Christian missionaries is inspiring despite its sentimental excesses.

Although the film invests time among the tribesmen, it never really explores the idea that one man's missionary work is another's ideological aggression. And the movie is tentative, dramatically speaking.

Not an emotional powerhouse so much as a dutiful public service announcement.

Coy crypto-Christian claptrap masquerading as feel-good ethnography.

Though designed by director and co-writer Jim Hanon to be spiritually uplifting, the story feels as whitewashed and disingenuous as an episode of Lassie, with the natives emerging as savage buffoons.

Under Jim Hanon's direction, the film manages to get its point across without coming off as heavy-handed or overtly religious.

End of the Spear is a childish and visually repetitive movie, ham-fisted, proselytizing and overtly simplified.

This is a movie -- albeit one with a great, gripping story -- shot through with meaningful glances, middling performances and melodramatic music cues. Pity.

Although overly earnest and often stilted, the film should find great favor principally among religious auds, and a long life on the home-vid shelves.

This undramatic would-be piece of inspiration seems like made-for-TV fare for the Christian Broadcasting Network before it morphed into the Family Channel.

What does hold back this terrifically detailed and often-entertaining effort are the limitations of the script and uneven acting.

This repetitive and poorly plotted production fails to engage.

The slickly produced Christian docudrama End of the Spear recounts with spiritual breathlessness the circumstances surrounding the real-life killings of five missionaries at the hands of a violent indigenous Amazon tribe in Ecuador in 1956.

Unmoving story of white missionaries trying to save the poor indigenous people of Ecuador. Paul Chambers, CNN.

A squeaky-clean family of missionaries lives out their fantasy of "saving" a violent tribe of Ecuadorian jungle natives in this virulently wrong-headed movie.

[Director] Hanon seems more interested in exploiting his setting's lush green beauty than exploring the psyches of his bland Bible-thumpers.

Through the harrowing experience of two men as told in End of the Spear -- Steve Saint and Mincaye -- moviegoers can learn the power of forgiveness and reconciliation.

Only marginally uplifting and just passably enjoyable as a film. I know in my mind that these experiences were extraordinary for the people involved, but I never really feel it.

...for those of us who are not part of the choir being preached to, the story is a dealbreaker.

Jim Hanon's film is so awkward and anachronistic that it raises more questions than answers.

An amazing true story of faith and martyrdom