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Dreadfully Boring

Simple and well acted, it has tension enough to knot the stomach.

The joyful confection is coated in a sparkly gloss, bright enough to gleam from the darkest, most cynical corners.

Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

Barely Watchable and Almost Average Movie that is a Jumble of Laments on Religion, Revenge, Retribution, Loss, and other Such Things. The Cringe Factor is Close at hand and the Intrigue Waivers while the Sporadic Violence is just there.What must have at first seemed a Challenge for Leguizamo seems Unattainable as Each Twin is Underplayed as to Their Respective Good/Damaged Characters. The rest of the Cast is Hit and Miss and the Plot, when it doesn't Veer off Course, is Interesting Enough to Maintain some Mild Musings as to Motive and Hidden Realities.Overall it is not a Complete Failure but doesn't Amount to Much after all is Said and Done. In Fact, the Ending may be the Weakest Part in this Weak Film, although there are some other Vapid Sub-Plots that might also be a Contender.

In the flatfooted psycho-religio thriller "The Ministers," John Leguizamo plays Scripture-spouting twin brothers - one with a scarred face for purposes of differentiation - who've made it their life's mission to gun down those responsible for the deaths of their parents and brother, leaving religious tracts with the bodies as calling cards. Florencia Lozano plays a beautiful cop from the Bronx whose father, also a cop, was dispatched by the hood-and-mask-wearing boys years earlier for reasons that aren't entirely revealed till the end.This Avenging Angel scenario has pretty much been done to death at this point, and "The Ministers" brings nothing new or interesting to the genre. Franc. Reyes is responsible not only for the contrived, melodramatic screenplay and lackluster, pedestrian direction, but also for eliciting some of the worst performances of their careers out of Leguizamo and that crusty, battle-scarred stalwart, Harvey Keitel, as a veteran cop with a secret. After all, with material this lame, it's rather hard to lay too much of the blame at the feet of the actors.

It's not like I have a thing against dual roles. For the kids of yesteryear, Patty Duke makes a passable pair of cousins. In the sci-fi puzzler MOON--released within months of THE MINISTERS--Sam Rockwell divided three ways comes off as a heck of a lot richer than the thin gruel provided here when Leguizamo is merely split once. Even the math in this SISTERS wannabe gets fuzzy, as the badder twin's half-baked make-up job smacks of the post-accident district attorney in THE DARK KNIGHT, leaving it up to the viewer to decide if there really are 1 1/2 or 2 1/2 Leguizamos (assuming they are interested enough in this less-than-it-seems-at-first story to do any such calculations in the first place).One of the main faults of what could have been a better film, besides the shortcomings of the male lead, is that it weakens as it goes along, ending with a seen-coming-from-a-mile-away climax which not only fails to satisfy, but even smacks of the sort of "let's off the crazies in a morally unambiguous way even if it doesn't jive with the first 99% of the movie" which often was required by the Hayes Puritanical Censorship Code in a country allegedly setting the world standard for "Freedom of Speech" from 1934 until 1964.

If The Ministers had a point to make, it didn't make it with me. After watching the film, I'm still puzzled as to what exactly it was all about.Young Florencia Lozano loses her detective father Benny Nieves in what was a hit carried out by two hooded men who have killed before and leave these Bible tracts at the scenes of their crimes. Years later she is now a detective partnered with Harvey Keitel who was her father's partner and her supervising detective is Wanda DeJesus who was trained by Lozano's father.The two killers known as The Ministers are also accused in the shooting deaths of a whole drug crew, a rather bloody bit of business that Sam Peckinpah would have been glad to choreograph. The two Ministers are played by John Leguizamo in a dual role as twins. One of the twins was badly burned in an apartment house fire as a child.In fact Leguizamo has a whole agenda of scores to settle, but he also gets himself involved with Lozano, the non-scarred twin that is.The Ministers has a confused message, a whole lot of violence and not a lot of rational sense to the plot. Seems a terrible waste of a lot of talented people.