If you cut all of the revival sessions in The Apostle, if you cut all of the hooping and hollering and exclamations of “Jesus”, the total running time would be about 14 minutes. Instead, we get a film that runs two hours and 14 minutes.

That’s not to say that the hooping and hollering isn’t interesting, it’s frequently quite amusing. It’s all the more entertaining with a fantastic performance by Robert Duvall as the semi-sane Apostle E.F., or “Sonny” as he is known to friends and family. Unfortunately, Duvall’s performance is really the only thing that carries our interest to the end.

Everything else about the film struggles to keep up the pace. The story begins as Sonny, an evangelical revival preacher in a small Texas town, discovers his wife, Jessie (Farah Fawcett), is leaving him for another man. She has also gotten the local congregation to vote him out of the church (however the heck that works). Sonny gets upset and ends up whacking his wife’s boyfriend with a baseball bat at a little league game. Although not intended to be lethal, the man doesn’t survive the beating, and Sonny takes to the road to avoid the police. He ends up in a small Louisiana town where he gets a couple of jobs and builds up a new church while keeping away from the police. Many more shouts of “Jesus” later, the police find Sonny and take him away.

Sonny converts some people during his time in Louisiana, but the conversions are strange, and the conversion of Billy Bob Thornton’s character is especially ridiculous. We are never given any reason to believe, or even understand, why he changes or what’s going on inside his head.

The primary problem with The Apostle, aside from the thin plot, is that Sonny never learns his own lesson. I got the feeling that we are supposed to feel sorry for Sonny, who supposedly went down to the end doing good. I think there’s supposed to be irony in the scene where he is arrested while in the midst of “blessing” so many lives. But there’s not.

Sonny is a jerk. I’m glad he finally got arrested. And I hope they keep him away a long time. He is fundamentally selfish and self-absorbed; he cares about the church of God alright, but he doesn’t seem to want to make God a part of it. He doesn’t care a fig for the commandments of God. Sonny is exactly the character that comes to mind in the New Testament scripture that says people “draweth nigh unto me with their mouth, and honoureth me with their lips; but their heart is far from me.”

Sure, Sonny is sincere when it comes to convincing people to “confess Jesus” and building up his church – his heart honestly is in that. But his heart is never really into doing what he always claims to be doing – following Jesus. He is constantly telling God that he’s willing to follow him, but he never does. At the very least, Sonny is an interesting character study. He teaches us exactly how we ought not be.