Interesting story behind me watching this movie ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find’.  You see I place these African American relationship themed movies in my Netflix cue for my wife as I have no real interest in watching them but as it turns out my wife took it upon herself to rent this movie and reported back to me, in explicit detail, how horrible she thought it was.  This is a woman who’s seen ‘Brown Sugar’ like eighty times, and if she thought this movie was bad then it must be damn near unwatchable.  Now I had forgotten that I had placed this flick in my cue some months ago because if I had remembered I would have deleted it out, but it worked its way up to number one and there it was, ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find’, sitting in a red envelope on my doorstep.  Since I got this movie for my wife’s benefit I was upset that I had wasted a good rental on a movie I’m not going to watch, but I thought to myself ‘Self… why not watch this movie to see how bad it really is?’  So I did just that.  And though every little description my wife gave me was dead on accurate, where she found derision I found joyful humor.  No, ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find’ was not a very good drama, but as an unintended comedy, it was pure gold.

Rachel (Golden Brooks) and Clarence (Darren Dewitt Henson) are having some marital issues.  The couple is unevenly yoked as Rachel is an MBA possessing high roller while her working class husband is a Bible thumping mechanic.  Clarence spends all of his spare time doing good deeds for the community and the church while not paying his lovely wife the proper attention that she DEMANDS and Clarence has also caught the eye of the virtually perfect church patron Chantel (Rachel Nicks), which isn’t lost on his DEMANDING wife who has correctly observed that Chantel seems a little more interested in Clarence than simple community service.  Now if Clarence knew what we know about his wife he would’ve had Chantel in the top spot a while ago, but he’s simply not that kind of brother.

You see what we know is that Rachel is taking her newly awarded college degree, paid for by her husband, on to the open market and has landed a job at some firm or another run by the silky smooth Damion Marshall… or Satan as he is played by actor Hill Harper, and Satan has taken a keen interest in his new employee.  He actually seems to have given her the job for the express purpose of getting in her panties, and though we find those panties well worth getting into, I don’t know if I’d give somebody a job paying a quarter million per for that express purpose.  But then that’s just me.  Eventually Satan’s plan works to perfection and beds the morally suspect Rachel while Clarence was out doing God’s work, which shockingly causes more conflict in the marriage.  Also on the periphery complicating matters is Rachel’s adult son who is selling drugs on the side, family friend Bruce (Darius McCrary) who is beating and cheating on his faithful suffering wife Charlene (Deborah Cox), and lastly family friend and lady killer Jasper (Mel Jackson) who secretly longs for Charlene’s girlfriend Monica (Melissa De Souza).  The question we hope to find the answer to is will Clarence stop donating so much time to serving God and helping people and will Rachel stop screwing her boss so that this couple can find the love they once had?

So from my wife’s point of view, she couldn’t find the middle ground between the fact that Rachel was servicing her boss’ sexual needs and that Clarence was serving The Lord.  She felt, for some reason, that the whore of a wife was completely at fault here.  I attempted to explain to her that a reasonable person would think that as well, if the movie were played straight.  To me this had to have been played for laughs because I know I was laughing when the whore wife confronted her God fearing husband accusing his need to serve The Lord and helping people as the reason she was bent over a desk in her boss’s office.  Funnier still was that the God fearing saint of a husband thought about that point for a while and then agreed completely and HE ended up apologizing.  Talk about running the okey-doke on somebody.

If any of you have ever seen any of those African American based staged plays, on which this one is based, then you know that they tend to be over the top, and though I haven’t seen this particular gospel play I have seen more than my fair share.  Director Leslie Small, who has adapted the Reverend David Payton’s gospel stage play, has kept all of the over the top spectacular goodness that I’m sure that play had to offer.  I think the problem with this particular production is that director Small has kept too much of the play intact and thus on film the over the top nature of the stage medium unfortunately translates to hysteria where on stage it is comes of as more dramatic.  Ridiculous melodramatic drama, but drama none the less.  Small did have a nice cast work with as Henson and the always lovely Golden Brooks did their best with the material they were given, in addition to the solid cast members mentioned above but especially Hill Harper who did bang up work as the character of Satan.  But alas the movie was so darned silly that it ultimately alienated its intended audience, which is my wife and her colleagues, and it ended up appealing to me… which is something a movie like this really doesn’t want to do if it wants to consider itself successful.