Don Verdean
Director: Jared Hess
Year Released: 2015
Rating: 0.5
The Bible-thumping title 'archeologist' (Sam Rockwell), along with his assistant Carol (Amy Ryan), gets hired by shady minister Tony Lazarus (Danny McBride) to recover Goliath's skull from Israel in order to bolster attendance for his church ... except Verdean has no idea where the skull actually is. The script, by Hess and his wife, is simply stunning in its logic-defying idiocy (I only laughed once, and that was when Jemaine Clement's Israeli makes Ryan's character wear a dress): all of the principal players in this are loathsome and immoral, with Verdean's grumbling fraud especially detestable. Making some kind of statement about corruption among preachers is curious since the Hess clan are Mormons, a group with a questionable history of its own. Draining McBride of his comedic talents is some kind of filmmaking miracle, hallelujah.
