Mission Air

Overview: A family of missionaries and drug runners (the pharmaceutical kind) have to contend with the deadly existential threat of God sending four no three no two and a half no two Mexican guys and thoroughly white bounty hunter Jamie Kennedy - who is trying (and miserably failing) to be a cool/tough as nails cowboy drifter and mercenary - to murder them horribly.

Directed By: Mike Norris, 2014

The Case For: See, they're a family of all missionaries, and their organization is called "Mission Air", and they have an airplane they use to deliver drugs and bibles. Get it? "Mission Air"? Missionary? Get it? If you're laughing and clapping with delight right now, then you are this movie's core demographic. If not, then there's not much of a "case for". Yep, and that's the Case For.

The Case Against: For a movie that Netflix promises will contain "Faith, courage and the armor of God", Mission Air is amazingly dull. Also, you'll have to deal with the soul-crushing disappointment of Tom Arnold playing a character named "Johnny Dingo" and not attempting a godawful Australian accent.

Mission Air is a movie which appears to exist mainly as a vanity piece for Gary Heavin - executive producer, Jesus freak, and founder of the "Curves" fitness empire: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Heavin. What little remains is basically non-stop hardcore single engine Cessna porn, occasionally peppered with painfully awkward interstitial "700 Club"-style softcore Christian TV banter and Tom Arnold comedy so gentle it could put an active crust punk mosh pit to sleep. Oh, and let's not forget some of the most confusing and poorly constructed dialogue you'll hear outside of an argument about two-letter words at the World Scrabble Championships.

The movie is set largely in deepest, darkest Mexico, but according to IMDB was filmed entirely on location in Dallas, Texas - possibly because the filmmakers were either a) too afraid of getting within 100 miles of the actual Mexican border for fear of getting kidnapped by cartoonish banditos and living out the plot of their movie IRL, b) terrified of catching the dirty brown people ebolAIDS taco plague, or c) somehow couldn't get local government permission to shoot their terrible condescending piece of shit movie that would undoubtedly make Mexico look like a primeval cave society ruled by roaming tribes of savages.

Any way you slice it, Gary Heavin, a real man who likely bankrolled the movie Mission Air and lent them a bunch of airplanes to film, plays a character in this movie who lends the fictional organization (read: ultra-Christian power mom and her dumb ugly family) "Mission Air" an airplane and bankrolls them - it's like some kind of bizarre, mind-blowing infinite movie recursion. We know we kinda went over this already, but it's basically the only mildly noteworthy bit of information we managed to take away from our took away from our 90 minutes of self-inflicted psychological hazing.

The less Gary Heavin-oriented parts of the movie mainly revolve around the aforementioned power mom's adventures in bringing Hey, Zeus! and modern vaccines to a village of Mexican dirt farmers, plus the occasional corn-fed white Texan lady from somebody's church bingo group who the director tried to sneak into the mix. Sensing the need for some dramatic tension, God summons forth a plague of incompetent banditos, who manage to kill one of their own while trying to overpower the unarmed Christian mother of two and her scrawny, useless Ricky Martin-looking soggy pool noodle of a son. (Interesting side-note: did you know that if you love Jesus and Accept Him as your Personal Savior hard enough, getting shot in the leg with large caliber revolver rounds will only leave tiny scratches smaller than paper cuts? Or that standard first aid for scratches smaller than paper cuts is to tie a tourniquet around the entire fucking leg?

Every day I pray the Lord Baby Jesus [what] take the Jamie Kennedy [plum] outta me. This commotion sets in motion a tale of revenge, corruption, and Jamie Kennedy Bounty Hunting which is far, far too dumb and boring to reproduce here. Fortunately, the bandito plot is only half the movie; unfortunately, the other half is about the trials and tribulations of Mission Air Mom's stupid buttface family, including the dad having a heart attack and getting fired, to which the wife responds with something about how "only God would shit so mightily upon our faces as a reward for spending all those years of our lives bringing bibles and vaccines to poor, dirt-farming Mexican heathens."

We'd try to keep going, but honestly after that bombshell we were just sitting there wondering just why the fuck we're being forced to witness any of this when clearly no lessons of any kind are being learned. Nor does this have jack shit to do with the whole banditos thing, in case you were wondering. We're guessing this is what the filmmakers, blinded by their weird Jesus boners (and possibly a bit of sunlight reflecting off the crooked smile of a creepy cherubim tsotchke) mistook for character development amidst their woefully misguided and slippery shit-fingered fever-grab at some sort of parable.

We've subjected ourselves to enough Christian "cinema" that we felt like we'd seen all of the possible combinations of smugness, false humility, and generally being out of touch. But making a movie about how you're a secret millionaire with a heart of gold which movie is also the meta-story of the making of that same movie? Seriously, that's like, some next level humblebrag shit right there (RIP H. Wittels). So we salute you, cast and crew of Mission Air, for boldly forging through a loophole in that whole "pride is a deadly sin" thing. That, and for making an entire movie which was too boring for us to pull any noteworthy video highlights from.

– Garrett "Hydrogen" Neil and Sean "Trillaphon" Neil (@trillaphon)