deadCenter Review: ‘Holy Rollers’
“Holy Rollers”
Directed by Kevin Asch
For a film about Hasidic Jews acting as ecstasy drug mules, “Holy Rollers” manages to be pretty monotonous. The premise, which is based on real events that happened in 1998, screams comedy, but director Kevin Asch goes the serious route, opting for a lightly-baked drama that comes off more insubstantial than deft.
Fortunately, the film has Jesse Eisenberg doing solid work as Sam Gold, a young Hasidic Jew who is being pressured to become a rabbi and marry a woman he barely knows. But the marriage falls through thanks to Sam’s perceived inadequacy, and he really isn’t sure if he wants to go down the ministry route.
When a next-door neighbor (Justin Bartha) offers Sam a chance to make some extra money moving medicine from Amsterdam to Brooklyn, he cautiously treads into the world of ecstasy smuggling — a world he’s soon entrenched in.
The film does a nice job with its progression of Sam, who starts out timidly, almost involuntarily, engaging in the process, then throws himself into it for the benefit of his family (the money enables him to buy his mom a new stove to replace her constantly faltering old one) and eventually just gets sucked into it for the pleasure of the lifestyle.
He gets in good with the boss, Jackie (Danny Abeckaser), and flirts with Jackie’s girl Rachel (Ari Graynor), but Sam’s quick transition from structure and devotion to lawbreaking and partying begins to take a toll on him.
“Holy Rollers” mostly stays on the surface level, and though the unfocused and lilting photography do well to communicate the haze Sam finds himself in, the film fails to be very visually or emotionally striking most of the time. There’s really only one way for this story to end, and the inevitability of the conclusion makes it seem a lot more mundane than it actually is.
Grade: 2 out of 4 Stars
-Dusty
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