A funeral for an ornery, little-loved father and husband serves as the catalyst for a soap-opera season's worth of revelations and life transformations in Kingdom Come, an inept, slapdash adaptation of David Bottrell and Jessie Jones' wildly popular theatrical crowd-pleaser. Whoopi Goldberg and L.L. Cool J lead a large, star-studded cast (Jada Pinkett-Smith, Cedric The Entertainer, Toni Braxton, Vivica A. Fox), playing the plain-talking, unsentimental widow and her recovering-alcoholic son, respectively. Clumsily alternating maudlin sentimentality, earnest drama, and crude humor—often within the same scene—Kingdom Come lurches lazily forward, betraying its theatrical roots at every turn with gratingly broad performances, stiff monologues, and unimaginative direction. Veteran producer-director Doug McHenry deserves most of the blame, both for the film's cheap, washed-out look and for the multitude of clashing acting styles on display. The performances are all over the place, ranging from thankfully restrained (Goldberg and Cool J) to broad and cartoonish (Loretta Devine as a shrill Bible-thumper) to sublime (Cedric The Entertainer, who somehow imbues his flatulent, speech-impaired minister with a certain dignity). The biggest surprise, however, is the usually excellent Pinkett-Smith, whose obnoxious, ball-busting small-time diva seems to have wandered in from a lost Tennessee Williams play. Kingdom Come is amateurish throughout, but it doesn't hit its nadir until its climax, in which the film's many characters nearly knock each other over in declaring the great epiphanies at which they've suddenly arrived. Late in the film, Cool J calls upon his family to behave with dignity and restraint for once in their lives. It's a nice sentiment, but for Kingdom Come, it's too little, too late.