By Don Jolly and Ethan Poe

The Identical is a catastrophe. A catastrophe for the company behind it, City of God Films, which sank sixteen million dollars into the production for a 2.7 million return. A catastrophic end for the 2014 wave of “faith-based” blockbusters, including Heaven is for Real and God’s Not Dead, the latter commanding the undimmed star power of Hercules himself, Kevin Sorbo. The Identical is especially tragic for its own stars. Seth Green, Ray Liotta and Ashley Judd, who will, undoubtedly, mark it as a career low. The only people who stand to benefit from the debacle so far, it seems, are critics. In his review for The Dissolve, Scott Tobias describes the film as “a bizarre, Ned-Flanders-friendly, piece of alternate history.” If nothing else, it’s an interesting subject to write about.

Put simply, this is a Jews-for-Jesus religious film about “Elvis Presley’s” identical twin brother growing up in an evangelical household, playing velvet paint approximations of Elvis songs and meeting an improbable number of messianic Jews for the time and place of 1960s Nashville. The film has a “message,” although unlike other contemporary entries in the genre the moral point of The Identical is drowned out by the film’s midcentury nostalgia, Elvis worship and focus on interpersonal “drama.”

The highlight of the film’s traditional acting is Ray Liotta, playing forty convincingly textured years in the life of a tent-revival Preacher. Less traditional, and more successful, is the starring role as played by the 40-year-old, heavily-botoxed Elvis Impersonator Blake Rayne. As the twin of Elvis-analogue Drexel Hemsley, Rayne gets to enact a series of rock-and-roll film clichés in a series of approximately period costumes and wigs. At times, he does okay. Mostly he looks like Max Headroom.

For those interested in the material culture of religion, The Identical offers a number of baffling, unforgettable scenes. In its second act, for instance, the drama is put aside and the entire cast weighs in on the importance of praying for Israel throughout the Six-Days War. At his lowest point, Rayne’s character is comforted by a dwarf (played by Seinfeld’s Danny Woodburn) who affirms that one can be both a “Jew” and “Christian” while implying a connection between the lives of Elvis Presley and Jesus Christ.

There’s a lot to think about in The Identical: its arc of bifurcating “religious” and “secular” pop-culture by dividing Elvis into twin brothers on each side of the divide, its constant deployment of messianic Jewish iconography and the film’s odd relationship with celebrity culture and Americana. Discussions of these topics will, eventually, come to define the film and shape the nature of its “cult.”

The Identical has failed. In a few hours, or days, the theaters playing it will move on. But for a movie this wildly odd, this strangely compelling, failure is a first step. Now that The Identical is an objective catastrophe we can all move on and provide it the reception it deserves.

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Don Jolly is a Texan visual artist, writer, and academic. He is currently pursuing his master’s degree in religion at NYU, with a focus on esotericism, fringe movements, and the occult. His comic strip, The Weird Observer, runs weekly in the Ampersand Review. He is also a staff writer for Obscure Sound, where he reviews pop records. Don lives alone with the Great Fear, in New York City. You can find his writing and art at: www.rockettotheruemorgue.tumblr.com.

Ethan Poe is a graduate student in religious studies at NYU. He is mostly focused on issues of contemporary Mormon media.