It's not like I have a thing against dual roles. For the kids of yesteryear, Patty Duke makes a passable pair of cousins. In the sci-fi puzzler MOON--released within months of THE MINISTERS--Sam Rockwell divided three ways comes off as a heck of a lot richer than the thin gruel provided here when Leguizamo is merely split once. Even the math in this SISTERS wannabe gets fuzzy, as the badder twin's half-baked make-up job smacks of the post-accident district attorney in THE DARK KNIGHT, leaving it up to the viewer to decide if there really are 1 1/2 or 2 1/2 Leguizamos (assuming they are interested enough in this less-than-it-seems-at-first story to do any such calculations in the first place).
One of the main faults of what could have been a better film, besides the shortcomings of the male lead, is that it weakens as it goes along, ending with a seen-coming-from-a-mile-away climax which not only fails to satisfy, but even smacks of the sort of "let's off the crazies in a morally unambiguous way even if it doesn't jive with the first 99% of the movie" which often was required by the Hayes Puritanical Censorship Code in a country allegedly setting the world standard for "Freedom of Speech" from 1934 until 1964.
One of the main faults of what could have been a better film, besides the shortcomings of the male lead, is that it weakens as it goes along, ending with a seen-coming-from-a-mile-away climax which not only fails to satisfy, but even smacks of the sort of "let's off the crazies in a morally unambiguous way even if it doesn't jive with the first 99% of the movie" which often was required by the Hayes Puritanical Censorship Code in a country allegedly setting the world standard for "Freedom of Speech" from 1934 until 1964.