Holy Rollers Review

Who doesn’t love a good old true-life story? In particular, who doesn’t love a true-life story that involves drugs? And who doesn’t love a true-life story that not only involves drugs but also involves Hasidic Jews? On paper then,Holy Rollers would seem to have all the right ingredients to be a fun-filled, watchable romp. Unfortunately, things don’t play out quite so successfully.

Everyone’s favourite Social Networker Jesse Eisenberg stars as Sam, a Hasidic Jew living in Brooklyn with his family and amongst other members of the Orthodox community. Money being tight, he takes his friend Yosef’s (Bartha) advice and begins smuggling what he believes at first to be medicine into New York from Amsterdam. Sam quickly finds out that the ‘medicines’ are in fact stashes of delicious disco biscuits. Sam becomes embroiled in the drug running and falls for his dealer’s girlfriend Rachel (Graynor), all the while keeping up the façade of being a good citizen and devout Jew. Eventually of course, things spiral out of control as events accelerate towards a near inevitable conclusion. Can Sam stop his family finding out the awful truth? Will Sam realise the error of his ways, but all too late to save a friend? And will there be titles prior to the closing credits that tell us what everyone got up to next? What do you think?

Director Kevin Asch’s main problem is a debilitating lack of plot. Whilst the central conceit – Orthodox Jews as drug mules – is undeniably beguiling, there really isn’t any mileage or indeed anywhere unexpected that it can take us. As such, Asch pads out his thin film with all too many montages of people dancing in clubs to 90s house music, which is unfortunate as the people on screen are clearly having more fun than those in the audience.

Whilst Eisenberg gives a decent performance, it isn’t enough to carry the film. It may have niche appeal as a curiosity, but Holy Rollers is ultimately quite flat, fairly dull and pretty predictable and is surely one of a very select number of films that would have been better if played as a broad comedy.