Ok, so before I start my review of this film let me just tell you, it is the worst movie I have ever seen.

Ellisa and I hired it out last night along with State Of Play (starring Russel Crowe and is actually awesome!). Thankfully we mainly wanted to watch State of Play but seeing Sunday School Musical on the New Release stand at Video Ezy we thought this will probably provide us a with a few laughs at church culture. I was also thinking it might be a bit like the movie Saved starring Mandy Moore, which is actually alright. But Sunday School Musical isn't even in that league. In fact, Sunday School Musical is in the same league as the movies we made at youth group last week with no effects on a hand held family video camera. It's better than what we made, but only just!

The Plot:
A young boy is in a choir in the rough part of town. They are good. They and another choir from the good part of town win a regional competition to go to the national competitions. The only thing is the choir from the good part of town sucks and got through by default - the third choir that was meant to enter the competition could come because they had a case of food poisoning from some scrambled egg sandwiches gone wrong (I'm not joking that is actually what they say happened in this movie). This led one of the guys from the good end of town choir to say, "Praise the Lord for Scrambled Egg."

Anyway, it just so happens that the bad part of town choir has this awesome singer in it. His Dad is away at war and his mum loses her job so he has to move into his aunts house across town (in the good part of town). So he has to change schools. Which he does and now he has to join the good part of town choir (who suck). Somehow he makes them good. In the meantime the bad part of town choir has had to close down because they run out of money. Just after this happens the minister at church preaches a sermon about love or something (I was fast forwarding at this point) and this makes the good part of town choir decide to merge with the bad part of town choir.

They go to the state championships and then the judge rules them out, but he lets them sing even though they can't compete. They are so good that the eligible winning choir gives all the prize money to the combined choir and this means they can open re-open their church. Somehow in all that the main characters (the really good singer/dancer boy) and the girl have hooked up. The movie ends with them having a peck on the lips and holding hands.

My thoughts:
The plot is mega lame. Not only mega lame, but mega unoriginal! It was a lot bit like Sister Act 2 and a bit like High School Musical. It also didn't make sense. Why did the star of the show have to move schools? And if he did, how come the two choirs could get together and practice later? Also, the schools had no people at them except the choir. You never saw people at the schools, just choir members. Likewise, no one in this film wasn't a Christian, that's pretty realistic...

Not only that, but the acting was terrible. The guy was clearly mouthing his words but he wasn't singing while he did that. He looked like he was talking while we heard an amazing singing voice. However despite that making the singing parts painful, they were better than all the acting! Slow, awkward. It was so bad. Not only that, but almost every scene went for too long. It was almost like they wanted to make the movie go for 90mins but the plot wasn't good enough to get them there, so they just created overly long scenes. For example, at one point the main girl character is studying for her test when her Dad comes in. They have some clichéd Christian parents care about their kids talk and then he helps her study for her biology test. That's an ok scene until we spend about 45 seconds actually watching them study together. Her Dad asked her a biology question and then she tried to answer it. She couldn't, so he taught her how to remember it. Then she got it and was ready for her test. An attempt to be educational? I think that scene started our fast forwarding stopping whenever it looked like something major was happening.

Also, it was meant to be a musical. But I reckon it had about 5-6 songs in it. That was it, and most of the time that was when the choir was singing, and therefore it made perfect sense for them to sing. It was like they had no understanding that in a musical everything is sung. Every scene has songs in it. Sure there can be some dialogue, but lots and lots and lots of singing.

Check out the back page of the DVD: They put the Hip in Worship


Summary
In summary then, this was clearly a low budget, low creativity, bad idea of a film. They would have been better off giving the money they spent on making this to poor kids in Africa, saving the planet from all the waste people will make by snapping these DVD's and putting them into their bins.

If I were to rate this movie out of 5 it wouldn't even get 0. It would get minus. Unfortunately you can't even watch it for a laugh. It's too boring to laugh at!

What other people have said:
There is a great review here on Christ and Pop Culture which raises many of my grievances with the film. I also learnt here that this movie was made by a film company that specialises in releasing films with similar names to big movies to make quick money. That is terrible.