Direction: Adamma Ebo
Country: USA
This religious satire in the style of a mockumentary deals with disquieting topics such as hypocrisy, delirious ostentation, sexual scandals, and humiliation within a Southern Baptist church. But the script leaves you wanting something more.
American-Nigerian writer-director Adamma Ebo carries her debut directorial feature with big ideas in mind but gets lost in a whirlwind of tonal inconsistencies. Her farcical depiction is obviously seen as a reprehension, but the narrative process - employing slapsticky dramatic sequences in reference to embarrassing situations, as well as on-screen descriptions - becomes a bit exhausted in its last third, when the film heavily decays. Also, no big laughs were found here, just some corrosive smiles that could have been taken further if the director had stuck with that particular tone.
Overall, the film should please iconoclastic crowds of disbelievers and get people thinking, talking and arguing. Actors Sterling K. Brown and Regina Hall, who embody a proud yet sinful pastor and the recurrently humiliated first lady, respectively, are the real deal and even rap along to Crime Mob’s “Knuck If You Buck”. They conspire to reopen their megachurch and regain the heart of thousands of worshipers lost to a younger couple of preachers.
Honk for Jesus has painful truths in it, but even eschewing the sort of cynical, tasteless jokes that a project of this nature would naturally attract, it would need some ingenious twists besides the obvious to succeed. What it lacks in vision, it narrowly makes up for with entertainment.
