This overlong drama plays like a threefold infomercial: for Christianity, the cheesy resort chain Sandals and Jeff “Ja Rule” Atkins, the rapper-turned-actor playing drug kingpin Miles Montego.
Miles is relentlessly described as a dreamboat, never more ridiculously so than by Stephen Baldwin as the DEA agent on his tail: “He’s smart, he’s rich and he’s good-looking. But I don’t necessarily think I’d want to marry him off to my daughter.”
As the title spells out, Miles falls for Vanessa (Adrienne Bailon), a woman who’s seriously into Jesus (though one wonders what he’d think of her gig at a retail store selling all manner of blinged-out stuff with crosses on it). At some point — it’s never clear when — Miles begins to steer away from his crime-centric lifestyle and toward Vanessa’s churchgoing one, though his past will inevitably catch up with them.
“I’m in Love With a Church Girl” falls firmly into Kirk Cameron-level evangelical territory; when the couple’s admiring a sunset, the conclusion is “Only He could have made this.” There’s an interesting grain of an idea here about the modernization of the church, but director Steve Race buries it under a torrent of platitudes.