"Let God be the Judge" -- Zach's Take

Let's just get this clear before I actually begin: Let God be the Judge is not a film.

It is merely a recording of a stage play.

This becomes obvious when the Arsenio Hall-esque audience cheers and applauds at every over-the-top monologue and laughs at each hacky bit of "comedy" in this mess. This is one of the most wildly inconsistent films I've ever seen. The first two-thirds of the recording (I'm not going to call this a movie) are played straight-faced and overly-serious. Then, a Tyler Perry rip-off character strolls onto the stage and everything becomes a joke. The worst part is this "character" would have seemed lame and tired even in the hey-days of the Eddie Murphy and Martin Lawrence Nutty Professor and Big Momma's House style of films. It just demonstrates perfectly how little the makers of this production knew what they were doing.

For those of you who don't get it from the title of the film, Let God be the Judge tells the story of an unbelieving man who gets killed and whose soul gets put on trial at the gates of Heaven. The premise is so hackneyed and utterly stupid that the producers took it literally, setting the whole thing in a courtroom. Which is only made worse when you consider that since this was shot live as the play was performed, there are exactly two camera angles for the majority of the proceedings: the left side of the stage and the right side of the stage. That also means other than the occasional panning to correct the framing, there are no camera movements of any sort. Which, you know, makes for really exciting cinema.

The acting isn't that bad actually, for what the players had to work with, but that's not exactly high praise. The funniest parts come from the actor playing Gabriel (the judge) who is very visibly reading the script the entire time andmakes no attempt to act other than when he has to say one of his lines. At least the other actors shuffled papers, took a sip of water, etc. Not him, though. He sits through the whole thing with his head down, reading straight from the pages. It's funny, but that coupled with the fact that the actor who plays Satan, the prosecutor, actually says "exstablish" multiple times makes it hilarious. That means that he clearly doesn't know the word "establish." If you don't believe me, check out that trailer from our post last week.

Aside from the abysmally stupid theology on display, the film also promotes offensively stupid socially conservative "values." A big deal is made about the main character potentially being gay. The audience is lead to believe that he might be homosexual and tonally, the play assumes that everyone in the audience naturally thinks this is morally reprehensible. Look, I get it. The people who would watch this junk without a hint of irony are most likely the kind of mongoloids who think that there is something wrong with being gay. But in 2010, when a film (especially a film made predominantly by and for a minority group) endorses such Bronze Age thinking, it becomes incredibly disheartening and makes you lose your faith in humanity a little bit.

So, yes, what I'm saying is that Let God be the Judge made me lose my faith in humanity. That's a CFP first, for me at least. Also a CFP first: this production is so bad it actually contains three, yes, three accounts of actual facepalming on behalf of the actors during the course of the play!

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