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.  

I was fairly certain I had watched this before, but couldn’t remember a single detail. It was similarly bland this time around, but I did recall details from my previous view as I watched. Very loosely inspired by Tim Owens’s experience replacing Rob Halford in Judas Priest, this features Mark Wahlberg as the lead singer of a cover band who is hired to replace Jason Flemyng, the gay lead singer of the band he imitates. Unlike the actual story, this is inexplicably supposedly set in the 1980s, but looks nothing like the 1980s. In fact, Jennifer Aniston looks like she just walked off the set of Friends to film her scenes. The movie is rather dumb and entirely predictable, but the shoehorning of the Seattle grunge scene at the end is borderline offensive. I was mildly amused at the stunt casting of real life musicians such as Blas Elias, Jason Bonham, and Zakk Wylde as musicians in the various bands and former partners of musicians as the rock stars’ wives. I do somewhat like the soundtrack, even the songs credited to the fictional bands.