Directed By Johnny Mack

Starring – Mickey Rourke, Jamie Foxx, Vivica A. Fox

The Plot – Billionaire talk show host Hoprah Windfall (Luc Ashley) uses her direct connection to God (Foxx) to demand he deliver a hero to help her plummeting ratings – or else she will cancel him. Panicked, God decides to call on the hardest-working man in the world, Taylor Pherry (Kevin Daniels). Despite Taylor’s lack of experience, God convinces him to do the impossible; write a hit movie using his dysfunctional, crazy family as the inspiration. But the Devil (Rourke) is in the details and he has a fiendish plan of his own to disrupt the whole ordeal.

Rated R for sexual material and some adult language.

OFFICIAL Not Another Church Movie Trailer-In Theaters May 10, 2024 (youtube.com)

POSITIVES

How in the blue hell Briarcliff Productions and Mack assembled the magnitude of celebrities that adorned this car wreck is beyond me, especially in that most of them commit themselves to craft while exerting passionate energy that can never be mistaken as them sleeping through their roles. The exception is certainly Rourke, who not only obviously shot all of his scenes in one day, but also carries with him a careless exuberance for deliveries that feels like he is quite literally looking and reading off of cue cards, somewhere beyond the camera filming him. Everyone else can at least be respected for the level of personality and prominence that they convey to the engagement, with Foxx’s God being the most charismatic depiction of the holy savior that I’ve ever seen, Lamorne Morris articulating razor sharp timing and cadence, and Daniels doubling down with two roles for the price of one, which pits him in the shoes of Tyler Perry, to who he mocks so ferociously. None of them are enough to capably save the movie from the disaster it became, but I commend them endlessly for bringing class and credibility to the proceedings, especially in that this will easily be the worst project that any of them have been associated with.

NEGATIVES

Spoofing Tyler Perry movies seems like an endearing idea that could possibly write itself, but when it comes to a laugh-less engagement and horrifying production values, it makes “Not Another Church Movie” feel far worse than even the darkest despair supplanted by Perry’s pitiful works. On the subject of the humor, it doesn’t work for a variety of reasons, but mainly the lack of creativity that comes with the gags, whether in the mean-spirited emphasis of mocking Perry’s rumored sexuality, or complete lack of ideas towards the spoofing, which feels like it runs out by the film’s ten minute mark, where it just sort of reverts into another Madea movie, with scatterbrained subplots and sprouted characters adding little to nothing to the experience. The line of tastlessness that this movie casually crosses pertains to the protagonist in this instance named Tyler Pherry (Pronounced fairy), with a walk and run that merit femininity, and while I am a hundred percent behind a movie mocking the works of a creator, I feel like his personal life is none of the business of the writers, and I can definitely understand why Perry has gone publicly on record to say that he’s disgusted with the makers of this film. For me, to say that I didn’t laugh once throughout the film would even be a grave underestimation, so instead I will say that I continuously scoffed, soured, and pitied for this juvenile buffoonery, and if not for an 82 minute run time that it only reaches by prolonging so many of these one minute scenes and sequences, it probably would’ve been the first film that I prematurely exited, in that nothing screams desperation louder than a truly bad comedy. As for the aforementioned production values, Mack’s film seriously looks like it was shot on a web camera, with cheaply rendered green screen work so artificially enveloping that it looks like a cheap psychic network commercial being played at midnight. These are felt the most obvious during scenes involving Foxx or Rourke commentating on the story in the foreground from Heaven or Hell, with a complete absence of tangibility in backdrops to at least fool the audience into thinking this is anything other than an actor standing against a screen, as well as unnatural hues of light surrounding the actor’s outlines, which is usually smoothed out in post production. I can understand a studio not wanting to spend a lot of money on a spoof, as well as them incorrectly thinking that it will add to the bizarreness of the appeal, but it continuously broke even my temporary investment each time the focus of the narrative reverted back to each of them, which is made all the funnier when they’re deposited into scenes of them interacting with other characters, where the dialogue and connectivity between sides doesn’t line up seamlessly towards feeling like these two actors ever met for even a single solitary second during the entirety of the shoot. The editing is also the physical manifestation of Attention Deficit Disorder, with abrasive cuts and obvious reshaping between various takes that the film tries to pass off as one collective effort. This could have a chance to succeed if each cut between two actors in frame didn’t depict varying proximity to the camera with each cut, proving that even the people making the film behind the scenes didn’t care how little effort actually went into something as simple as surmising continuity and naturality to various interactions, creating a distracting patch job that very well could be the result of a lack of film to fix underwhelming line reads, especially with a final shot to the movie that abruptly cuts to black when Jamie Foxx is in the middle of delivering a line. There’s also major issues with the storytelling, in that an additional arc and characters are introduced and brought into the fold, every fifteen minutes until the very last minute of the movie. One could certainly argue that this faithfully depicts spoofs for the randomness they often illustrate, but the spontaneity here is something that feels far worse, with arcs feeling like they don’t even fit into the established dynamic of the characters, or rhythm of the movie’s pacing, forcing us to re-establish the various situations and stakes, each time a new one arrives unceremoniously. In addition, there’s no long-term conflict being approached or unraveled, which makes the film feel like a series of ideas instead of one creatively cohesive product, and while spoofs can often be deduced to a series of skits, there’s often one extensive narrative that draws all of them under the same roof, with so much excessive fluff here that could’ve been cut from the finished product, and the movie would’ve gained more than it lost. As for unfortunate instances that carry over from Perry films, the female characters are once again either mentally unstable or sexual objects for male obsession, and the males are sex-driven perverts or absentee fathers who do nothing to evade an unfortunate racial stereotype. More of the blame for this can certainly be cast on Perry than the makers of this film, as the latter are simply spoofing the actions of the former, however promoting such, even in imitation, only further continues the troubling depiction, cementing a group of characters who are not only the culmination of vitriolic stereotypes, but also ineffective interests for audience investment, which border annoying far quicker than they do compelling.

OVERALL
‘Not Another Church Movie’ fuels the fires of anger and disappointment by producing a film so awfully ineffective that it leaves audiences apologizing to Tyler Perry by proxy. Humiliating humor, distracted storytelling and year’s worst production values are just a few of the unfortunate aspects that make this such an insufferable engagement, and with elements of homophobic misogyny sprinkled in for the good measure, the film is an 82 minute thesis for why most spoof films should be left in the past, with its only capable recreation being the full-fledged trainwreck that are orchestrated by directors so obviously in over their heads.

My Grade: 1/10 or F-