This was originally going to be a review about an old Jet Li film called The Evil Cult that I spotted in the video shop, but 5 minutes in the film sucked so bad that I couldn’t be bothered even watching it let alone writing about it.
So welcome to my thoughts on a kooky little film called The Ministers.
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The film starts with policeman Joe (Harvey Keitel) witnessing the cold blooded killing of his partner and best friend. Also in close proximity are the murder victims wife and young daughter.
Fast forward a few years… The young daughter Celeste is now “all growns up” and is a cop. In fact she is Joe’s partner. Joe eats nothing but unhealthy crap, Celeste smokes, (not sure if that is supposed to mean anything to the story aside from giving the two something to talk about, but they dwell on it quite a bit).
That’s all well and good, but who the hell are The Ministers? Well in essence they are twin brothers (both played by John Leguizamo), religious puritanical nutbags who operate very much under the “eye for an eye” mantra. One of the twins has severe burns that have disfigured half his face, the other looks remarkably like Johnny Legz.
The Ministers were responsible for the death of Joe’s buddy/Celeste’s Dad many years previous, and shortly after the film hits the FF button they strike again, killing an infamous local slumlord.
It appears that many years ago that the slumlord deliberately torched his own property to collect the insurance, killing many and permanently disfiguring Scarry. He and his brother waited several years for him to be released from prison so they could personally mete out their justice, it also is evident that they had special reasons for killing Celeste’s old man. The pair are basically idealistically flawed pseudo religious vigilantes with some serious social interaction deficiencies.
Once it becomes evident that The Ministers are indeed behind the new killing due to their telltale calling card of leaving religious pamphlets on the bodies of their victims, Celeste immediately wants on the case but is shut down promptly. But this is a movie and we know it isn’t going to finish that easily.
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After a few twists and turns that meander nowhere Celeste and Joe are on the case, in one of those “could only happen in the movies” gimmicks one of the Ministers (the non-scarred one) approaches Celeste outside her church and boldly strikes up a convo. In short he puts the moves on her.
For some reason they strike up a relationship, only Celeste of course has no idea that the guy she is dating is the guy she is hunting, and the guy who smoked her old man. Non-Scarry neglects to tell Scarry back at home too, and once he actually twigs the shit really hits the fan.
There are many more twists to come, and even though it does get bogged down for a while introducing overly complicated plot developments that generally lead nowhere by the end of the film it actually does end up making sense.
The one question that kept popping back into my head was: “Did any of this really need to be told?”
Final Rating – 6 / 10. Even when you understand the full story you might still be underwhelmed. Still, it’s better than the first 5 minutes of The Evil Cult.
Trust me on that.
