‘Father Joe’ Review: Kiefer Sutherland and Al Pacino in a Holy Mess of an Action Flick

Of the many questions you might ask while watching the latest Luc Besson-produced bargain bin action flick, Father Joe, the first is most certainly: What the hell — forgive me father, I meant what the heck — were Kiefer Sutherland and Al Pacino thinking by signing on to this thing?

Another is: When is the movie supposed to be taking place? The cars all seem to be from the late ’70s or ’80s, but there are desktop PCs and old Nokia cell phones. My guess is that it’s sometime in the 1990s, the period during which Besson hit his high mark helming stylized thrillers like La Femme Nikita and The Professional. It also feels like that could have been when he first dashed off the script for Father Joe, stuffed it in a drawer, and then for reasons that are most likely financial, decided to resurrect it for us today.

Credited as writer and producer, with EuropaCorp regular Barthélémy Grossmann taking on directing duties, Besson oversees another schlocky genre flick with a few bravura fight scenes but not much else going for it. Sutherland and Pacino rarely seem to be enjoying themselves in roles that require them to recite the French action maven’s barely passable dialogue, which they do without much fanfare. After premiering out of competition in Venice, Father Joe should head for a modest afterlife on streaming.   

Sutherland stars as the titular gun-toting priest, who seems like a mash-up of two action heroes (John Wick and Constantine) previously played by Keanu Reeves. After serving in the special forces and losing his daughter to a drug overdose (this all seen through wonky flashbacks), Father Joe makes it his mission to take down all the smack-dealing syndicates in New York — or a city that’s meant to be New York but looks like an amalgam of CGI and an unnamed Eastern European capital.

He begins by ambushing the warehouse of a mafia henchman (Michael Rispoli), offing dozens of men without ever committing a sin, at least according to his own interpretation of the scriptures. Joe’s vigilante antics soon draw the ire of mob kingpin Giuseppe Falcone (Pacino) — this is the best name Besson could come up with — who confronts the killer priest in a confessional before vying to take him down. There’s also a subplot involving organ harvesting, Russian traffickers and a rabbi (Fred Melamed) who joins forces with Father Joe, proving that Goys and Jews can occasionally fight crime hand-in-hand.

The whole thing plays like something concocted by an 8th grader sitting in the back of biology class and doodling movie ideas in his notebook, offering more proof that Besson has never quite risen above the juvenile tendencies of his early years. In the least, you’d hope the action sequences would be exciting, but they mostly consist of loud and generic shootouts strewn with splashes of gore. The stabs at humor also fall flat, even if the gimmick of a priest injecting his enemies with a serum that obliges them to attend mass every Sunday is kind of fun the first time, but not really the second or third.   

Sutherland does the bare minimum in a silly costume consisting of a clerical robe, leather vest and broad-brimmed black hat that makes him look more Amish than Catholic. Pacino seems so exhausted by the whole thing that he can’t even do a decent Pacino imitation. The only standout is Ever Anderson (Black Widow), who brings some life to the screen as a 16-year-old druggie Joe takes under his wing, although her character feels like yet another underaged heroine in a long line of them churned out by Besson over the years.

If one were being generous, one could ostensibly say that Father Joe is a solid B-movie with some funky twists, including a church crypt filled with guns, grenades and other weapons in the priest’s sizeable arsenal. But the film doesn’t even rise to the level of boilerplate Besson franchises like The Transporter, losing itself in crime movie clichés — the Italian mobsters are so overcooked that they make Gotti look like The Godfather — doled out by genre junkies who seem way past their prime. Pray for something better.