Part old-school Hollywood-style biblical epic, part hipster pop-gospel groovathon, part playful Pythonesque satire: the wildly indulgent and thrillingly audacious second feature from Jeymes Samuel, set in AD33 Jerusalem, sees the director of The Harder They Fall having his loaves and fishes and making a fully catered last supper out of them.
LaKeith Stanfield stars as Clarence, twin brother of the apostle Thomas (also Stanfield), identical but for a few moral irregularities and the fact that, unlike Thomas, Clarence is pretty down on the whole idea of faith in a higher power, preferring the certainties of knowledge. His current certainty is the knowledge that if he fails to repay his chariot racing debt to Jedediah the Terrible (Eric Kofi Abrefa) within the next month, he’s a dead man. To complicate matters, Clarence is in love with Jedediah’s sister, Varinia (Anna Diop). Clarence has what he thinks is a brainwave, but given that he is so high on “ungodly herb” that he’s literally levitating, his judgment is probably not to be trusted. In the hope of wriggling out of his financial embarrassment, Clarence sets himself up as a rival Messiah.
For the first two of the film’s three chapters, the picture is driven by swagger, a rich Technicolor-inspired colour palette and plenty of irreverent humour. Mary Magdalen (Teyana Taylor) is a champion chariot-racer; the apostles stride through the city to a soundtrack of 70s-style power funk (Samuel composed the score). But in the third section, sacrilege gives way to sanctity, and the film starts taking itself and its faith-based message more seriously. It’s an unwieldy tonal swerve, but one that Samuel, directing with his customary showy panache, just about pulls off.
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