The Book of Clarence

Grade: D-

Monty Python’s Life of Brian chronicled Jesus’s last days leading up to the crucifixion, with fictional characters. It’s not quite a spinoff. You might call it a parallel story. A page is taken out of that same playbook with The Book of Clarence, with miserable results. It’s 2 hours and 9 minutes of ineffectual, sterile boredom. It’s a threadbare, tedious experience, and I hope it’s the worst movie of the year.

It’s a comedy-drama that pretty much fails at both. The very talented LaKeith Stanfield stars as Clarence (and also plays his twin brother, Thomas). It’s Jerusalem in the year 33 A.D. Clarence has a month to come up with money to pay off a debt. He gets the idea that there’s financial gold to be mined in the religious field, as evidenced by the recent success of this guy Jesus Christ. Though he’s a notorious religious doubter, he gets baptized, and begins preaching to whoever will listen, and in quick time, drums up more green than he can imagine. Throughout the movie, he enjoys inhaling copious amounts of “green” as well.

Sounds like an interesting premise, right? What didn’t work? Just about everything. Director Jaymes Samuel (The Harder They Fall, They Die By Dawn) can’t get this off the ground into anything meaningful. There are a couple of laughs, but it’s primarily either dull, or dark and heavy, as you would expect from this material. It’s difficult to watch for many reasons, then it reaches almost Passion of the Christ levels of unsettling.

I’m a great admirer of Stanfield, but the quality of his filmography is inconsistent. He’ll have a Get Out, Uncut Gems, Knives Out, and Sorry to Bother You (my favorite comedy of 2018) – but he also has a Haunted Mansion and Judas and the Black Messiah. Alfre Woodard, David Oyelowo, and Benedict Cumberbatch do what they can, but ultimately, The Book of Clarence is dead on arrival. I’d better not see it come back on the third day.

Grade: D-