Release Date: Currently playing on VOD platforms
Director: Scot Michael Walker
MPAA Rating: NR
Film Pulse Score: 1.5/10
A couple of things are clear after watching Scot Michael Walker’s Rockin’ Reverend. At least based on this single film, he is not an accomplished writer or director (he filled both roles) but he is an interesting actor. And so it was rather sad to see an interesting idea for a story with an interesting lead actor (Walker) fail so miserably. Walker’s take on a struggling Shakespearean actor who decides to become a preacher when he realizes how tithes work and how much money can be made simply does not hold up to scrutiny. But he is an interesting personality, or at least he played one on television (as the idiom goes, and so it made the film’s failure all the more disappointing.
Walker plays a character named Robert – a divorced man with a young son with whom he has a pretty good relationship. He gets the idea to become a preacher after seeing his girlfriend’s minister driving a $70,000 hummer. Given his agnosticism, he cannot and does not become a “real” preacher, but instead creates a church based on claiming how God and the Bible is bullshit (his words, not mine). He delivers blasphemous “sermons” filled with expletives but finds a flock big enough to get him a Porsche, a huge house, and enough cocaine to satisfy a Columbian drug lord.
The film’s focus – if there is a focus, which I would argue there is not – is on his creation of this pretend preacher, although we understand the things he espouses on stage are the things he actually believes. He goes head-to-head with a local minister (that of his girlfriend’s) and ultimately that minister will seek revenge for Robert making in-roads into the community.
The film has so much foul language, there is little dialogue left. It is only at the film’s end when Robert’s son has been taken to another state by his ex-wife and her new husband that he speaks sincerely; this time, he is on a pay-cable channel where his former girlfriend, ex-wife, and former best friend (who used to be part of his “act”) watch with a mixture of horror and admiration. It is in this short televised sermon that the 1.5 rating comes from; that is, 1.5 from say, well, a “zero” rating. Walker finally shows some sense in the way he talks about God and, for a moment, I was almost moved. Then, he ruins the moment in the last two or three minutes which I will leave unspoiled here.
Skip this film at all costs. But do not write off Walker as unwatchable. Though no other cast member got my attention – you will notice none are named above – he is watchable. Now, if he only had something worth watching him in, he and we would be in business. Here’s praying that happens.
