Honk For Jesus. Save Your Soul. attempts to be a biting satire of the lavish lifestyle of the mega pastors in America. Its setup is intriguing and the performances from its leads are certainly committed and engrossing, but the story is still somewhat in need of divine intervention.
Regina Hall and Sterling K. Brown star as Trinitee and Lee-Curtis Childs who once ran one of the biggest churches in Atlanta. Lee-Curtis fell under a scandal that rocked the church and drove its members away except for five faithful disciples. Now they’re doing what they can to bounce back. The pastor even makes the comparison of how he’s Rocky despite him losing in the first one.
Things go from bad to worse for the couple as another church is about to open and give them some serious competition. They’re a lot younger than the Childs and they see their youthfulness as a threat. Both churches want to open or reopen on Easter Sunday.
The movie is filmed in mockumentary style and it mostly follows Hall’s Trinitee as she goes about her daily life in preparation for their comeback. She is the Tammy Faye Baker of this movie and the parallels are not exactly subtle.
While that’s going on, the other half of the movie follows Lee-Curtis’ journey from his rise to prominence to his crushing defeat. Sometimes he and his wife are at odds and that does provide some drama that does work in pieces, but other scenes fall flat.
Honk For Jesus. Save Your Soul. could’ve benefitted more if it knew what tone it was going for. Instead, the movie gives us inconsistent scenes of real laughs and others where it wants to be somber. It’s that jarring of tones that wore me down.
Hall and Brown are really good as the faith-based couple and they dominate the screen in almost every scene. They do have a sense of genuine chemistry whether they’re with or against each other, but the script is a bit of a mess by not really letting them be either completely authentic or a caricature of the pastors they’re trying to imitate.
Having said that, I would prefer this over 90% of the Christian movies that have been churned out over the last few years and I think some of them could learn a thing or two about certain things this movie wants to say. Maybe this movie could be a test run for other movies looking to be like this. Who knows?
Grade: B-
(Rated R for language and some sexual content.)
