Movie Review: The Lost Medallion

Recently I watched a movie called ‘The Lost Medallion: The Adventures of Billy Stone’ a 2013 American-Thai adventure fantasy Christian family film.   It starts off with a man, who used to be in foster care, stopped into his former foster home to drop off some donations and gets roped into telling the kids a story.

The story begins in a flashback in which a man holding an item wrapped in cloth is running away from another man.  The man digs a hole by a tree and buries a medallion. The story then flashes back to the present where Billy, an amateur archaeologist is being told to leave an archaeology site by his dad, a proper archaeologist.  

Billy’s dad has spent his life looking for the long lost medallion but amazingly Billy finds it, and while in a dodgy situation makes a spontaneous wish which takes him and his friend Allie back 200 years, where their island is a very different one to the one they live on now.

They are captured and taken to a nearby village where the village king Huko notices the medallion Billy has in his hand and claims that it is his. The people now say Billy is true king as whoever wears the medallion is king of the village.

The story continues, following Allie and Billy who are again being chased by two goons wanting the medallion. They are on the run now, but are not on their own, they are joined by King Huko and Anui, another boy from the village.    Later the group is corned by a river and Allie is captured but Billy agrees to exchange her for the medallion and after the exchange the kids jump over a waterfall to avoid capture.   The kids quarrel among themselves but decide to try and seek help from an old wise man, Faleaka in the mountains.  The wise man tells them that they must complete tasks, and in return he will teach them how to defeat Cobra, the man that they gave the medallion to.

Cobra is still after them because the medallion doesn’t work for him and he wants to know what Billy has that he hasn’t. And it turns out that the medallion will only work with those who have a kind heart, which is why it worked for Billy but not Cobra whose heart is bad.

While the kids are with Faleaka, he gives them some very wise advice.  He tells Allie, who is foster care, “God never makes a mistake, in his eyes you are not an accident”.   Very wise, and spoke to me as well, I was adopted and when I was younger, I felt like a mistake.  But as Faleaka says, “no one is an accident to God, he has a purpose for everything’ and this is backed up by Psalm 139 where he psalmist wrote “For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb”.

Faleaka has more wise advice saying,

•  “We all need to trust out hearts to the one who created it”
• “Don’t ever forget God loves you, more than you can ever know”

Wow, aren’t those words amazing. We will never be alone as long as God is with us.

Cobra and his man catch up with Faleaka and the kids and tries to kill them all, at one point an arrow is shot in Billy’s direction but Faleaka pushes him out of the way and takes the arrow himself and dying. In his dying moment, Billy and Faleaka had the following conversation;

Billy: “Why would you die for me?”

Faleaka: “Because a great king once died for me”

So true.  This is the greatest kind of love, giving your life for someone else.

After a lot of running and chasing, the movie ends with Billy getting the medallion back and giving it to Huko, the rightful owner. Huko then activates the medallion to send Billy and Allie back to the present day where they end up back in Billy’s house. 

Back in the real world, the movie ends with Daniel, the storyteller, expressing the story’s message of God’s love and you can tell the story has moved and affected the foster kids.