If Jesus Christ were to return to earth today, what would he think about the state of the world, and how would he advise us to fix things?
I’m sure people have been pondering that for as long as Christianity has been a thing. It’s a great premise for a morally challenging, satirically incisive movie.
Unfortunately, The Jesus Tapes is not that movie.
Here’s the minimal plot: On taping day for a public access television show, a man shows up claiming to be Jesus. With time to fill because of a cancellation, the skeptical host (presumably played by writer-director Rick Pamplin) decides to interview him. The broadcast of the show provokes a public furor, not so much for anything the man says as for the mere fact that he claims to be Jesus. Some accept that he is who he says he is, others accuse him of blasphemy.
A second show is taped and broadcast. A third one is recorded but the station owner doesn’t want to be at the censer of controversy and orders all the tapes destroyed.
The Jesus Tapes was clearly made on a very low budget. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing if you have a strong script and capable actors. This has neither. The bulk of the movie consists of “man on the street” interviews, most of which repeat the same points over and over.
Despite the prominently displayed quote from Kurt Vonnegut Jr.—“If what Jesus said was good, what can it matter whether he was God or not?”—little of what the putative Messiah has to say is particularly provocative: mankind has the power to cure all of its problems, and they should believe wholeheartedly in God. It doesn’t help that the actor playing the role (the film has no credits) mostly comes across as a scold. (And how much imagination would it have taken to portray his as anything other than the debunked white Jesus that artists have been painting since about 300 AD?)
Pamplin has said that he first had the idea for this movie in 1977. That’s the year that Hollywood released a much better movie about the deity visiting the modern world, Carl Reiner’s Oh, God!, with George Burns and John Denver, a movie you’d be much better off watching or rewatching.
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