Not Another Church Movie Review: Thank You Perry Much

comingsoon.net:

The good news — pun intended — about Not Another Church Movie is that it’s nowhere near as bad as the Jason Friedberg/Aaron Seltzer atrocities that didn’t just kill the parody subgenre but scorched the earth beneath it for a while. Unlike sheer lazy garbage like Meet the Spartans, Johnny Mack’s Tyler Perry spoof has actual jokes, and not just recreated scenes from other movies. The bad news is it’s still not very well made — Mack’s genuinely funny script is let down by his own pedestrian direction. A former writer for reality TV and awards shows, Mack’s making his feature debut here (actor James Michael Cummings gets a co-director credit at the end), and unless the meta-joke is that it’s deliberately clumsily directed to reflect Tyler Perry’s early films, it feels very much like a first movie full of growing pains.

Hell, even if it is designed to mock Perry’s directorial learning curve, it still doesn’t work as such. Award-show humor requires a different sort of timing than a fiction film, and the editing here veers between too slow, awkwardly sudden, and working around the fact that Jamie Foxx (as God) and Mickey Rourke (as Satan) clearly showed up in front of a green screen for just one day apiece. By all appearances, Foxx couldn’t be bothered (or perhaps paid) to show up for reshoots and ADR, so half his scenes replace him with digital distortion.

Fortunately, the movie has a strong lead in relative unknown Kevin Daniels (Passing Through) in the dual role of Taylor Pherry and his aunt MaDude. It’s a running gag that “Pherry” is said with a silent “p,” allowing the characters to make jokes involving hairy, fairy, and “his P don’t work.” Those aside, the best jokes in the movie involve the not-so-thinly veiled homoeroticism in so many Perry films, and much like them, it never quite comes out and says the obvious.

Daniels plays Pherry as the most perfect human being alive in a storyline that points out the absurdity of all the familial connections in the