Reviews

This film is nice and enjoyable, as long as you take it on its own terms.

The Mexican beach town is lovely, and the local Mexicans charming, but the film overall has the feel of an improv done on vacation (which it may actually have been). The director's comments on the DVD pretty much confirm this impression, as does the fact that the actors get credit for helping to create the characters, and that IMDb shows almost no other filmwork by any of them.

The technical production quality is good, but the writing/directing/acting are all pretty clearly student-level work. Nicely done, and I hope these folks get to do more in the future, but they are also all pretty clearly still learning their crafts. The acting sometimes fails, the writing is full of predictable clichés, the continuity fails noticeably in places, etc.

But it is still enjoyable.

I think it's unfortunate that some of those who liked this film imply that anyone who found it a waste of time is a boor, who is only interested in Jim Carrey style films. There are some very off-beat, "arty" films that I enjoy a great deal. This was not one of them, though. To me, it was "okay", but certainly not great. The humor was very subtle. I got most of the "jokes" (or humorous aspects, really, more than jokes) that people have mentioned, but they just weren't all that funny, to me. Maybe I actually sympathized with the characters too much; the humor was overwhelmed by the sadness of their situations.

The scene where they execute the executives was filmed in the USX building in Pittsburgh. The church out the window is the First English Lutheran Church on Grant Street.

More generally, I liked the film's story, but thought the pacing wasn't quite right. Important things went by too quickly, while unimportant scenes dragged on too long.

As others have said, there's nothing anti-Christian about it; I felt (as a Christian) that it clearly had a Christian outlook. It does pillory tone-deaf clergy who misrepresent Christ, but there's no harm in that.