First off, I think it's worth giving credit where credit is due - it's been long past time for satirists and comedians to nut up and give us a parody of overtly religious and conservative films. They're almost parodies of their own ideologies themselves, but there's a big hole in the market for the Airplane or Hot Shots of Christ based exploitation films. Jesus, Bro! tries to fill this need.
It doesn't succeed, but points for trying.
They say to write what you know, so of course our main character is a YouTube star famous for sitting on a couch and ranting about something. This time, it's atheism. Honestly, the early scenes of Rick are as earnest as the film gets, as even in his overblown, exaggerated rants, he's not much worse than some people who actually exist on YouTube. But his life changes when his girlfriend (who's joke is that she only talks in exposition! It's funny because... bad movies do that?) realizes his atheism is more important to him than her and breaks up with him. She then goes off to immediately have 20 kids offscreen instead of doing something equally fundamentalist Christian that could have been enjoyable for the audience to watch.
Rick drinks some craft beer brewed with holy water and passes out into a vision where he meets Jesus. But not really Jesus, it's Santa Christ from Nostalgia Critic for no reason.
Brad Jones, despite still holding affiliation with Channel Awesome, has largely been independent. His channel covers several review niches, he has his own group of co-conspirators with varied tastes and opinions on media, and he maintains good relations with former CA contributors like Allison Pregler and Phelous Porteous. Which is why it's so disappointing that for this film, instead of developing his own vision of Jesus and the devil, he leans on Rob Walker's Santa Christ character and Malcolm Ray's devil from Nostalgia Critic. There's really no reason for it, other than maybe it was a condition for the Walker brothers and Fard Muhammad to appear in the film. It's the sort of cynical connection to the embattled Channel Awesome brand that makes this feel less like an intelligent parody and more like an extension of an exhausted meme.
The film kind of goes on and on and on from there, with Rick going from over the top atheist to over the top Christian. This is where a good parody would have delved into the sorts of imagery and media cues that films like God's Not Dead use to comment on how those creators use the media for their message. But I suppose that's my own fault for expecting subtle comedy from a movie called Jesus, Bro!
It's way too long for the amount of material they had for this story, and it shows. And yet, it's still the most competent non-review piece of media to ever come out of the Channel Awesome ecosystem. I wanted to like it, and I keep wanting someone from this group to actually go and watch their own reviews and learn some lessons about how not to make a bad movie. But seeing as the next offering will be a sequel to the Cinema Snob movie, I'm not holding my breath.
