Everyone Knows The Historical Jesus Was Not A Jacked MMA Fighter. ‘The Carpenter’ Proposes Otherwise

I’ve been watching the UFC since that meant renting VHS tapes from the local Blockbuster, and for most of its existence, the fact that MMA was sort of a fringe sport meant it attracted fringe advertisers. That the sport wasn’t quite ready for primetime was part of its appeal. The kooky brands, with their distinctly not-focus-grouped slogans plastered everywhere—DudeWipes, CondomDepot, Xyience (which is, yes, a portmanteau of “xxtreme” and “science'“)—only underlined that.

“Jesus Didn’t Tap,” essentially a glorified T-shirt company with an eponymous slogan (founded by the actor who played the Green Power Ranger, which is neither here nor there), was arguably the most memorable of the goofy UFC brands, hitting its high-water mark during the Ugly T-Shirt craze of about 2008 to 2012 or so. That the brand managed to combine kitsch Christianity with kitsch Affliction Bro culture in a single pithy slogan felt like a new bar had been set for unabashed tackiness. No choice but to respect it and whatnot.

These days, UFC sponsors are duller and more focus-grouped, but still kind of fringey — crypto.com, RizzPharma (which I guess is like “pharmacy” plus “rizz,” a new twist on Xyience), and VeChain, “the official blockchain provider of the UFC.” (How the average UFC viewer would even utilize a blockchain is a mystery to me). UFC sponsors are still weird, relative to the mainstream—just more anodyne and less straightforwardly crass.

And so when I saw, during the most recent UFC pay-per-view, an extended trailer for The Carpenter—a movie that seemed to be about Jesus Christ training an MMA fighter for some Biblical Times version of an old school UFC tournament—I thought we are so back.

Remember Jesus Didn’t Tap, Bart? It’s back, in movie form!

The most disappointing thing about The Carpenter is that a movie that promises to be deliciously tasteless turns out instead to be mostly blandly tasteful. Okay, maybe not tasteful, but more merely kind of lame and corny rather than proudly, brazenly moronic.

To be fair, some of the technical aspects of The Carpenter’s production certainly do evoke elements of a Jesus Didn’t Tap-era UFC production. With its cheaply lit, distinctly flat cinematography (often intended to evoke candlelit interiors filled with chintzy Roman props), The Carpenter is, visually, an almost too-perfect evocation of the UFC’s sadly now-defunct “Gladiator” intro, right down to star Kameron Krebs’ bulky powerlifter body.

Meanwhile, The Carpenter’s soundtrack is pulled entirely from the era that gave us “Face the Pain” by Stemm (2004) as the UFC PPV music, and the old “bear witness to the fitness of the modern warrior” Ultimate Fighter theme song, the lyrics to which every late-aughts UFC fan knows by heart. Does The Carpenter needle-drop two separate Godsmack songs? Absolutely. Do the bodies hit the floor? Buddy, you better believe the bodies hit the floor.

Okay, so it’s the old Gladiator intro meets bellicose nü-metal. What’s the problem? The problem is that outside of the obvious trailer scenes, The Carpenter is barely even about MMA. I spent the first 40 minutes or so of it making bets with myself on which ex-UFC star would get the first cameo, until it finally became clear that none of them would. It’s hard to overstate how weird this is, for any low-budget action-adjacent movie, let alone one specifically about MMA. Hell, I can turn on the Hallmark channel and be reasonably confident that Keith Jardine will eventually show up playing a heavy. Ex-UFC dudes love showing up in bad movies. The Carpenter couldn’t even get Clay “The Carpenter” Guida.

Instead The Carpenter stars Kameron Krebs as “Oren,” an adopted son of Cana, who, when we catch up to him in 29 A.D., is earning a pittance beating up other dudes in “the fighting pits.” Actually, the film opens with a strange title montage, starting with the creation of the world in 4,000 BC, with Adam, then jumping to Esau a thousand years later, then Moses, and then a few other Biblical dudes before we eventually get to Cana in 29 A.D. It’s hard to tell what this mini Biblical history lesson has to do with the movie, but perhaps it was important for them to establish that it takes place in a world where the dinosaurs never existed.

Anyway, Oren, when we meet him, is in the process of getting sort of beaten up by another buff guy in a ring of dirt. Some Roman soldiers start betting against him, but Oren’s brother, Levi, advises them not to, as “my brother simply refuses to ever lose.” Sure enough, something finally gets Oren fired up (unclear what) and he ends up slamming his opponent to the ground and pummeling him until the Biblical equivalent of Big John McCarthy pulls him off. “One day you’re going to have to learn to rely on something besides your temper, brother,” Levi tells Oren.

They share a nice walk back to their parents’ pillared Israelite house, only to find that their father (Peter Butler) has died in a roofing accident. In his dying breaths, Oren’s father tells him to go to Nazareth and make a new life there.

And so he does, with Levi in tow, seeking out first his uncle Sharar, a bald guy I thought might be Roan Carneiro at first but ended up being distinctly British (Daz Crawford). Sharar “knows some people” in Nazareth’s fighting pits, which are apparently a step up from Cana’s. Oren beats up a guy there, but in the process also beats up the ref and some Roman soldiers (once again it’s kind of unclear why). Oren has to escape on foot, and when he’s finally cornered, a burly carpenter named “Yeshua” ends up saving his ass.

“Yeshua” (yes, our boy JC, lamb of God, the holy one) is played by Jeff Dickamore, who, like Oren and Levi, has thick biceps and an easy smile and generally looks like he came straight to the set from a Fellowship of Christian Athletes meeting. Even at the time I thought he had a look that was distinctly Mormon, because the Mormons tend to depict Jesus as more yoked and burly than any other denominations. I say “at the time,” because once the credits rolled and I saw that Oren and Levi were played by Kameron and Kaulin Krebs, in a film co-written by Kenny Krebs, the Mormonness was all but confirmed. No non-Latter Day Saint would name their kids “Kameron and Kaulin Krebs.”

Indeed, the $3 million film turns out to have been largely financed by Kenny Krebs, owner of “Concrete Reinforcements Inc.,” and stars his sons, Kameron and Kaulin, who played fullback and wide receiver for Cal, respectively (Dickamore is a BYU grad, but apparently not a football player, even though he looks like one).

The Mormonness feels relevant to a discussion of the film because there’s an inherent sweetness to The Carpenter that keeps it from being the kind of tasteless spectacle one might expect (or say, hope for) from a movie that combines the teachings of Christ with Godsmack music and choke slams. Mormons are often hokey but rarely vulgar. That shows in The Carpenter, whose major flaw (aside from the amateurish acting, lighting, and choreography) is that it doesn’t really have any conflict. And traditionally when Christians were involved with gladiatorial combat it was to get torn apart by lions, so one naturally expects some conflict.

Oren goes to apprentice with Yeshua, who’s mostly just a nice guy who helps people out and teaches Oren carpentry while dispensing good advice about talking to his crush (Mira, played by Aurora Florence). The Carpenter turns out to be less “What if Jesus Christ was an MMA trainer” and more “What if Jesus Christ was the wise auntie in a Hallmark rom-com?”

For his MMA advice, Oren turns instead to Amos (Andre Jacobs), a doctor who offers Oren practical knowledge about where the liver and kidneys are, and what kind of blows might fell a man in hand-to-hand combat (from an anatomical perspective, natch). And… it works! Oren wins all his fights! All Jesus really says about Oren’s fighting is, “If this is your gift, can you cultivate it to positively affect those around you?”

Sounds reasonable enough! But pretty dull compared to “Jesus didn’t tap.”

There has always been a conflict between Christianity’s essential charity and egalitarianism (Norwegian black metal drummer Hellhammer called it “its pitiful glorification of the weak”) and America’s prized virtues of self-reliance and individualism. Martial arts has a similar duality, as both a refuge for the bullied and a tool for bullies. The UFC’s association with fascists and psuedo-fascists has only gotten stronger over the years, to the point that it’s hard to think of fighters who aren’t crypto-conservatives anymore. UFC president Dana White was one of the first people Donald Trump invited onstage during his election victory press conference, after White reportedly spent election night with Trump and Elon Musk at Mar-a-Lago.

How did it happen that virtually every fighter I follow—and the UFC brand itself—went from apolitical to explicitly authoritarian? Dana White’s personal loyalty to Trump aside, my running theory is that, in training the weakness out of themselves, fighters come to resent weakness in others. Which can easily spiral into all sorts of victim-blaming ideologies, especially when deliberately exploited for those purposes. And conservatism is, at its heart, a way of blaming victims for their plight to deny our own suscepibility to suffering. Couldn’t be us, we’re exceptional! Being a fighter, to some extent, is to believe in your own exceptionalism. Which doesn’t have to mean being uncharitable towards the poor and downtrodden, theoretically, but in practice so often does.

Partly I was hoping to see how The Carpenter would reconcile these things. How it would turn the guy who famously advised turning the other cheek into a coach who says tapping out is for pussies. The meek may inherit the Earth, but the here and now is for the bold!

And… mostly it doesn’t try to reconcile them. In The Carpenter, Jesus is just a good-natured, husky tradesman who tells you to talk to the girl and train hard.

Cue the training montage. Which takes the form of Oren and his brother doing tricep pulldowns on a Judean-era Bowflex machine made out of a rope looped over a ceiling beam and tied to a big rock. Eat your heart out, Fred Flintstone. Most of Oren’s fight training (cable machines, rope swings, free weights) looks more like crossfit or a football workout, which is fitting for an MMA movie that actually doesn’t seem that interested in MMA. The fight choreography likewise doesn’t bring much new to the table, with nary a flying armbar or inverted triangle to be seen, and only a couple half-assed superman punches and slams. Lethal Weapon had more MMA techniques in 1987 (thanks to Rorion Gracie being one of the technical advisers).

Maybe that’s just what happens when your MMA movie doesn’t have any MMA people in it. The Carpenter just doesn’t have the kind of brazen stupidity it would need to make it deliciously watchable; it feels more like a school project by some nice Mormon boys. Mormonism seems unique among Christian sects in being able to successfully reconcile Christian fellowship with rugged American individualism, by simply applying the “free real estate” model to the cosmos — the hereafter as the new western frontier. That lack of tension shows in The Carpenter. It isn’t that tacky, maybe because there just aren’t as many contradictions to reconcile. Its funniest moment is when Oren has to train for “the Jerusalem invitational.”

And perhaps that’s why the UFC didn’t much participate in this one. The organization bent over backwards to accomodate MGM’s Road House remake, letting director Doug Liman film entire scenes at UFC 285, in a film that had a minor role for retired UFC vet Jay Hieron and a major one for current UFC star Conor McGregor (who is currently in court over rape allegations). The Carpenter is a throwback to nü-metal and Affliction shirt MMA, and in being just kind of sweet and mostly apolitical, it’s possible that it just isn’t mean enough for today’s UFC.