Thursday, March 20, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Film: LSD not LDS: The R.M. will have you begging for acid-trip escape

By Anthony Allison

God, Yahweh, Allah and Shiva damn the Mormons and their moronic movies. May some vengeful deity condemn those latter-day sinners and their reels of shamefully frittered celluloid (Brigham City, The Other Side of Heaven) to burn eternally in Beelzebub's boiler.

Whoah, dude, lighten up. Aren't we being a little extreme here? Well, excuse the blasphemous outburst, but director Kurt Hale and co-writer John E. Moyer's follow-up to last year's The Singles Ward justifies such wrath and indignation.

One positive thing about The R.M. is that the title will likely deter viewers who aren't hip to secret LDS code (it's short for "Returned Missionary"). Our plucky, titular hero (Kirby Heyborne) returns to civilization (Salt Lake City) from some godforsaken hellhole (Wyoming) to learn that a promised job has evaporated, his gal's run off with another guy and his parents are more interested in a Ponzi scheme than their prodigal son.

Enter pretty Britani Bateman, and Kirb's best bud (Will Swenson), who's forsaken the missionary position for a sinful frat house. Adventures with a Town Car and an unlikely courtroom scene precede the inevitable happy ending.

This seemingly innocuous stuff purports to poke gentle fun at the Latter-Day Saints. But the affectionate mocking backfires, unwittingly revealing a sanctimonious and very skewed world view (white, middle-class, privileged). Kirby's mom (Tracy Ann Evans) thinks her South Pacific houseguest (Leroy Te'o) speaks only "Tonganese." And eek! There's a "naked ninja" (Joel Tamiguchi) in the family's old shower. Talk about antediluvian. Such "humor" is barely removed from the noble savage and slant-eyed caricatures of old. In its way, The R.M. is as offensive as D.W. Griffith's glorification of the KKK in Birth of a Nation or The Jazz Singer's Al Jolson warbling about his "Mammy" in blackface.

Yet what makes this excrescence truly unforgivable is its makers have conveniently ignored the injunction that you can't serve God and mammon, and they've learned Hollywood's shameful, open secret: There's endless money to be made by purveying cinematic pabulum to a benighted populace. These folks ain't doing this for God or Brigham Young. They're in it for the filthy lucre. Eternal damnation's too good for them.