Father Stu breaks no new ground in the biopic game, but it’s a solid and worthy tribute to the real-life Father Stu, who continued to do the Lord’s work until his death in 2014 at the age of 50.
Although this true story (even if embellished a bit by the filmmakers) inevitably builds some emotion, it ends up feeling more banal than spiritually exalting.
Father Stu is not your everyday Hollywood religious odyssey — it’s closer to “Diary of a Country Cutup.” It’s a surprisingly sincere movie about religious feeling, but it is also, too often, a dramatically undernourished one.
Anyone who’s sat through enough of those Christian films and watched them with a critical eye (and not for the mere indoctrination) can easily tell that the basic craftsmanship of Father Stu is on a different level. That doesn’t necessarily make this an admirable production, but at least it’s a proficient one.
As a critic who’s professionally obligated to reckon with the latest trends in Christian cinema, I have to admit that Wahlberg’s R-rated conception of godly entertainment seems almost divine when compared to the culture war militance of “God’s Not Dead” or the Sunday school hokeyness of “I Still Believe.”
The most interesting parts of Father Stu, an OK film in which Mark Wahlberg plays a rough-hewn man who finds redemption in an unexpected place, are not the ones you — and possibly the filmmakers — would expect.
There’s always something a little off about Father Stu, a sense that the filmmakers have taken a lot of liberties with a real life to make it extra saintly.
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Slant MagazineDerek Smith
Slant MagazineDerek Smith
The film is a Hollywood-approved show of Old Testament judgment that sees all people as sinners and thus deserving of all the punishment they receive.