Month: January 2022

When tax attorney Steve Martin opens his door to the woman he thought he had been corresponding with online, he instead finds Queen Latifah, an escaped felon who wants his help in clearing her name. She soon ingratiates herself to him and his family so he offers his assistance. I generally find Queen Latifah very likable, but she has been in a number of stinkers in her career and this is one of them. It’s mostly forgettable except for its very broad racial stereotypes, especially those coming from racist neighbor Betty White.

Burt Lancaster returns to Los Angeles to find his ex-wife Yvonne De Carlo. Even after marrying gangster Dan Duryea, she’s willing to rekindle their romance. To hide their affair, Lancaster proposes an offer to the mobster, a plan to rob the armored car company he works for. It’s a bleak story that, even with some time jumping, makes great use of a short run time. As the title suggests, there is plenty of double crossing and reasons to question loyalties, barreling towards an ending that doesn’t seem like it’ll be positive for anyone.    

With an impressive cast, including Harry Lennix, Chaka Khan, and Dawnn Lewis, I had gone into this telling of Jesus’s last days from the Gospel of John expecting a gospel music version of Jesus Christ Superstar. In some ways it is more and others much less. It obviously has a much lower budget than the average film I watch, but they attempt to do a whole lot with that budget combining a whole bunch of styles from outdoor live action shots to meta stage renditions to CGI heavy scenes in between. Some of these worked better than others. I preferred the live action straight tellings more than the more experimental scenes, but mostly I really loved the music throughout. Some film versions of Bible stories are told to reach a mixed-background audience, but this feels firmly as if it were made solely for Christians.