In 2013’s I’m In Love With A Church Girl, future Fyre Festival promoter Ja Rule stars as Miles Montego.

Miles is wealthy and powerful and glamorous and he owes it all to his career as a drug dealer.  However, at heart, he’s still a good son who loves his mother and who worries about disappointing her with his criminal lifestyle.  His mother is big into church and she wants Miles to settle down with a good Christian girl.  Miles is like, “It’ll never happen.”  But then, at a party thrown by his accountant (Vincent Pastore), Miles meets and falls for Vanessa Leon (Adrienne Bailon).  Vanessa is a …. wait for it …. church girl!

Falling in love with Vanessa changes Miles.  He realizes that there’s more to life than just making money and hanging out with the members of his drug-dealing crew.  He goes to church with Vanessa and is shocked to discover that the preacher owns a nice suit and drives a fancy car.  The preacher explains that it’s not a sin to by stylish.  Tell that to the Amish, preach.

Anyway, Miles may be finding God but the DEA still wants to take down Miles and his crew.  Martin Kove appears in one scene as the DEA supervisor who orders Stephen Baldwin and Michael Madsen to make Miles their number one priority.  Madsen isn’t in much of the film but Baldwin makes many appearances, popping up regularly to remind us that Miles is still under surveillance.

Miles’s new-found faith is tested when his mother dies.  Then, when Vanessa ends up in the hospital, Miles really struggles.  If you’ve ever wanted to see Ja Rule deliver an angry and impassioned monologue about faith, I’m In Love With A Church Girl is the film for you!

To give credit where credit is due, I’m In Love With A Church Girl was clearly made with the best of intentions.  The film was written by Galley Molina, a real life former drug dealer who later became a preacher.  Molina reportedly based the film on his own life story and the end result is an very earnest film that does seem to believe it’s own message.  That’s a good thing.

The bad thing is that the film, with its 2-hour running time, is almost painfully slow and the rather simple story is stretched so thin that the film itself becomes a bit of an endurance test.  The other problem is that Ja Rule is, to put it charitably, not a very good actor.  He sleepwalks through the film with a somewhat dazed expression on his face, projecting little of the charisma that you would probably need to get an otherwise sensible person like Vanessa to overlook your drug dealing career.  He certainly doesn’t have the screen presence to carry a two-hour film and he big dramatic monologue is more likely to inspire laughter than tears.

(It doesn’t help that it’s hard to look at him without thinking about him bragging about how great the Fyre Festival was going to be.)

The film is so well-intentioned that I kind of hate to be critical of it but I’m In Love With A Church Girl doesn’t really work.