I believe in Regina Hall and Sterling K. Brown.
Here are two dynamite actors that lift up this comic skewering of commercialized religion and send it soaring to heavenly bliss. So come blow your horn for "Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul," now in theaters and ready to stream on Peacock. Last year's "The Eyes of Tammy Faye" played it for real with Andrew Garfield as corrupt preacher Jim Bakker and an Oscar-winning Jessica Chastain as his warrior wife ready to do battle with the male-dominated Christian right and the scandals embroiling her husband.
MORE: Review: 'Anatomy of a Scandal' features exhilirating performances"Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul," written and directed by Adamma Ebo and produced by her twin sister Adanne Ebo, goes the fiction route to take some big swings at the greed, hypocrisy and rampant ego-mania at the roots of personality preaching and mega-church fraud. But Hall and Brown save the movie from its worst excesses.
The reliably superb Hall plays Trinitie Childs, the first lady of her church, whose marriage to Brown's pastor Lee-Curtis Childs is threatened by the boys who keep accusing him of sexual misconduct. As a result the large congregation of 25,000 deluded souls has dwindled to a handful the Childs call "the divine 5." Even worse, another Atlanta church called Heaven's House, run by married ministers Shakura and Keon Sumpter (a terrific Nicole Beharie and Conphidance), schemes to make a major play on Easter Sunday by adding defectors from the church of Childs to their own growing flock.
MORE: This is Going to Hurt keeps you riveted from first scene to last: ReviewLee-Curtis concocts a plan, not for redemption but for a comeback that would allow him and his wife to return to their glory days when they sat on church thrones and indulged their passion for fashion, cars and mansion living. Here's the strategy: The Childs will hire a documentary crew to record their path to absolution and bring back the adoring parishioners with fat wallets. Taking off from a 2018 short film of the same name, that debuted on Issa Rae's YouTube channel, the Ebo twins set out to tell a cautionary fable that reflects the Bakkers but from a Southern, Black perspective.
It's a worthy goal that the script and direction fail to ably execute. Luckily, Hall and Brown are miracle workers who raise the bar at every turn. With "This Is Us" gone after six seasons, it's a pleasure to see Brown in action again as he captures the hubris of Lee-Curtis with a flamboyance that gives way to regret in the rare moments of quiet that the film grants him. Hall is a revelation, creating a flesh-and-blood character almost out of thin air. In the space between the words that the script keeps throwing at her, Hall creates a woman in full, who might finally see a way back to the faith she's lost. Even when their movie crumbles around them, Hall and Brown bring the funny and the feels that deserve a hearty hallelujah.
