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DIRECTED BY: Steve Taylor

FEATURING: Newsboys (John James, Peter Furler, Jody Davis, Duncan Phillips, Jeff Frankenstein, Phil Joel), Phil Madeira, Greg Menza

PLOT: A popular contemporary Christian pop band takes a break from their tour to try and organize a grand finale for a dying circus.

COMMENTS: In the fall of 1967, the Beatles were experiencing the highest of highs and the lowest of lows. Their newest album, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, was already being recognized as a landmark in the history of pop music, and their worldwide broadcast of “All You Need Is Love” had reached more than a billion people in the heart of the Summer of Love. On the other hand, they had abandoned the grueling work of touring, and their manager Brian Epstein had just died, leaving the band without anyone to advise them or act as a buffer for their wildest ideas. In the face of this adversity, and with the confidence that comes from being the biggest rock band in the entire world, the Beatles moved forward with a Christmas TV special, Magical Mystery Tour, that would go down in history as their first mammoth flop. The program, a hodgepodge of proto-music videos, improvised sketches, and random clips slammed together in hopes of achieving comedy via cognitive dissonance, is actually the kind of thing we like around here, being that it is so wildly ungoverned by factors such as logic, restraint, or taste. Despite that, and the fact that other Beatles projects like the “Get Back” sessions have been rehabilitated through the passage of time, the Magical Mystery Tour remains a hard watch.

So if the Beatles couldn’t do it, what on earth made Newsboys think they could pull it off? This 90s-era Australian-American pop band that brought a Savage Garden-Barenaked Ladies-Gin Blossoms musical sensibility to the upper echelons of the Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) charts does not immediately seem like a good match for a personality-driven medium like film. And they’re not. Their songs are mildly catchy, their vibe is low-key amiable, and their humor is mainly of the dad variety. We’re not exactly looking to Newsboys to let their freak flag fly, and the banner they end up hoisting is pretty benign.

(A necessary sidenote: Newsboys are still around, like the Temptations having gone through numerous personnel changes . A recent lead singer for the group was accused of heinous sexual misconduct, but at this stage he and his collaborators are years away from joining the band. So you won’t see any known offenders in this film.)

There is something exceptionally odd about the whole production, but it’s the kind of strangeness rooted in inexplicable choices. Why choose a circus theme and then not have any of the trappings of a circus? Beyond the big tent itself and a couple clowns, the circus is mostly talked about, not shown. Why spend so much time demonstrating the lameness of the slate of performers? Not catastrophic awfulness, mind you, but just categorically bland and weak. Why give characters elaborate quirks and then not commit to them? Twins Carlene and Darlene never get into lockstep, and while we can be grateful that the presence of little people as mob enforcers is not played for the stereotypical cheap laughs that you might expect, the result feels less like trope subversion and more like virtue signaling. The film doesn’t even know what kind of joke it wants to tell. It’s not as over-the-top loony as Spice World, only dips its toe into the waters of Spinal Tap-style mockumentary, and definitely has no interest in the subversiveness of Head. I supposed they’re too Christian to get no-holds-barred weird on us, although they even soft-pedal the evangelism: a prayer is cut short by hijinks, while a copy of the Bible is revealed to have been stolen from a hotel. (Um… commandment?) It seems like someone in the Newsboys camp wanted to get outrageous, while somebody else kept a tight grip on the leash.

So if the story’s not the thing, then their best option would seem to be to appeal to the mass of diehard, rabid Newsboys fans. Big Top doesn’t really do that, either. The filmmakers seem to recognize that none of the band members has a grain of personality, but resting what little plot exists on the shoulders of lead singer John and bassist Phil only highlights how threadbare the story is. The movie can’t even work up enough interest to see Newsboys being Newsboys, aside from snippets of a concert and two full music videos clumsily dropped in during the last ten minutes (a fact the director helpfully lampshades). Of course, this turns out to be the right move, since those videos contain exponentially more wit than anything that has come before.

Down Under the Big Top is definitely a strange object, baffling in that it does nothing to satiate rabid Newsboys fans, and also doesn’t go far out enough to draw in curious outsiders or connoisseurs of weirdness. It just sits there, without so much as an “I Am the Walrus” to justify the effort.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“It truly is a weird little movie that, on the surface, seems worthy of derision. However, it really depends on the angle from which you want to critique it… Is it terrible from a cinematic perspective? Absolutely. Does it have storytelling issues? Without question. However, it possesses an awkward, oddball charm that is kind of fun.” – Nicole Pramik, Sci-fi Fantasy Lit Chick

(This movie was nominated for review by Jenn. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)