Have Cheetah,Will View #37 – “Fishes N Loaves: Heaven Sent”(2016)

It’s 2:52 am

Once again I was out and about looking for some fresh movies to watch and once again,my local Family Video didn’t let me down,my local store had a ton of new 1.50 titles for sale.  I walked around  slowly and as I looked over the new selections that is when I saw the cover for “Fishes N Loaves”. What caught my attention was seeing Patrick Muldoon and Dina Meyer on the cover.
Anyone who knows me knows that “Starship Troopers” is one of my very favorite films so seeing two of the main stars in Muldoon and Meyer working together definitely caught my attention. Add in solid character actors Bruce Davison (X-Men) and Dominique Swain and this looked to be a good family film.
The plot is pretty simple,Muldoon plays a pastor at a failing church in Los Angeles that is going to be closed down. He is offered an another church as a interim pastor in Eufala (You follow),Arizona. His Pastor Randy gets some unexpected wisdom passed along by a homeless man about the path Randy should take.
His family is very happy in Los Angeles and doesn’t really want to move as Randy and Mary Louise (Meyer)’s two teens would miss their friends and school.
After a short stint at his brother-in-law’s pizza place,Randy is again gently encouraged by the homeless man to take a leap of faith.
The family moves to Eufala and meets a slew of slightly quirky people at the church including the retiring Pastor Ezekiel (played by Davison) and the saucy church secretary Reva (Swain).
Pastor Randy has six months to find a new pastor and the clock is ticking…..

So,did the cheetah and I like this movie?  We really wanted to especially based on the cast of this faith based movie.  But it was so slow and heavy handed. The story was full of old cliches and when the homeless guy is named “DeAngelis” and suddenly pops up and then vanishes,well you know that writer Kenneth Lemm has watched his fair share of “Touched By An Angel”. The direction was was plodding as a slow stream,the dialogue was flat and couldn’t be saved despite game efforts from most of the cast.
Patrick Muldoon has really made a nice transition from action hero type of roles into a very reliable family movie leading man. I have watched a few of his recent efforts and he has done a good job. This was the first film in which he wasn’t very good,his performance was one note and wooden. His voice was also hard to listen to,it was very raspy,like he had smoked two packs before every scene he was in.
I actually felt Dominique Swain’s Reva stole the film…she was sassy,sweet,slightly sexy and as the single mother to Alex (Nicole Criss),she showed her love and support to her daughter when she needed it the most.  Swain is good actress who really thrives when she has a good script to sink her teeth into.
But one strong performance isn’t enough to save this sleepy film and so the cheetah and I say throw this “Fish” back into the lake.

But if you want to check it out yourselves,you can “Fishes” on Amazon.

Thanks for reading and please feel free to drop a comment below.