I’m Not Jesus Mommy

No, no you are NOT Jesus because I’m fairly certain Jesus would’ve had the common courtesy to put a comma in that freaking title.  Seriously.  That’s the first thing that’s wrong with I’m Not Jesus Mommy but never fear, that’s not the only thing that’s wrong here, trust me.  There’s lots more to come!

The story starts out with a woman.  She’s a cancer survivor but unfortunately the cancer left her unable to conceive.  She has a husband who seems pretty sweet and loving – I mean they spend the first 20 minutes of the movie dancing around the kitchen and drinking wine and snuggling.  In between the lovey-dovey, there are shots of the woman (Kimberly, btw) being interviewed because she is also a fertility doctor (irony!), then going to a top super secret meeting with military personnel, then getting all furious because at this top super secret meeting she learns that these people are cloning, then after that she decides to take a job with them.  Hey, minds can be changed in the blink of an eye.

Roger is the lead doctor of this top super secret cloning project which seems to mostly consist of catching illegal immigrants and offering them the chance to become a permanent resident if they agree to be implanted and carry a baby to term.  The embryos that aren’t implanted are destroyed which agonizes Kimberly.  So what does she do?  She grabs the first one she sees and impregnates herself, of course!  No learning anything about the embryo or where it came from or any characteristics of it, nope, just point and shoot with the turkey baster.  She’s totes excited about this and runs home to tell her husband who becomes furious.  Why?  Because she didn’t ask him and this wasn’t just her decision.  This was an odd turn of events to me because it’s made pretty apparent before hand that Kimberly really really wants a baby and if you didn’t want a baby, Mr. Husband, pretty sure you should’ve said something like, AGES ago.  *shakes head, rolls eyes*  Mr. Husband runs off in a rage and immediately gets into a car wreck where his car is flipped over.  Then another car comes along a minute later and smashes into him.  Oh well.

Baby is born (which is pretty epic because all the other embryos implanted were still-born), baby is baptized.  And suddenly, it’s 7 years later and the world has gone crazy.  Mexico has closed off its borders and built a wall to discourage US and Canadian citizens from crossing into their land.  People are being fed government rations and starving.  There’s barely any electricity or heat and all that’s on the telly are the government rules (curfews, punishment for not obeying the rules).  Life pretty much sucks.

I’m sorry, mommy, I didn’t mean to start the apocalypse.

Now, remember Roger, the cloning guru?  Well, he’s gone extremely religious.  He’s somewhere between fanatic and extremist.  I mean, he’s smothering people in the name of love and all that (just a note – one of the people he smothers is an adorable little child so if that sort of thing bothers you, for sure never watch this one).  And baby?  Well, his name’s David and he has an imaginary friend named Kuddles and his mommy is dying and he wants to go to Mexico.  There’s a lot of “yada, yada, government is bad, yada, yada, mommy is dying, yada, yada” exposition and then suddenly we’re at the end of this thing without anything really having happened.  I will tell you this much about the end.  The whole “I’m not Jesus” thing comes about from David having been cloned from blood found on the Shroud of Turin.  Yep, he’s supposed to be a Jesus clone.

So what are my issues here?  How about a handy little list?

1.  The acting is bad.  Kimberly is completely monotone.  “My baby!” carries as much weight here as “I took out the garbage.” It’s entirely distracting.

2.  This movie has no idea what it wants to be about.  It starts off being about the dangers of cloning, then suddenly it turns into a statement about immigration, THEN it goes all religious and finally at the very end, it’s about cloning again.  Now if they had picked just one of these (hell, even two) it would’ve made for a much more linear narrative but instead we get a jumble that doesn’t know what it wants to be preaching about.

3.  The description I read about the movie before I watched states that “odd things happen when David is around”.  NOTHING odd happens when David is around except that he’s a weird kid that wants to bring his mom back to life when she dies.  And there’s one instance where Kuddles seems to “come to life”, so to speak.

4.  We see people getting killed and then a minute later, all that’s left of them is their clothing.  So we seem to have the Rapture going on but why do they need to die first for this to happen?  Admittedly, I haven’t gone to church in awhile but my understanding is that you can just be raptured without being killed first.

5.  Why did the world suddenly go all Big Brother crazy?  There is NO indication of this happening prior to the title card “7 Years Later”.  Did cloning make this happen, is that what we’re supposed to surmise?  This plot point seemed to come totally out of left field.

So much wrong when this could’ve been so much of a right.  *sighs*