Father Stu

Let me start off by saying that I completely understand all of the hate this film is getting, and that's because for the first half of the film I hated it too. For too much of this film, a lot of the characters are just unlikable slobs . . . especially Mel Gibson's character of Bill Long. Also, the story plays out . . . well, it plays out terribly for the first half of the film. It wasn't until later in the film when Stuart Long decides to become a preacher that I was actually invested, and why's that? That's because Long was an absolute piece of trash that I didn't want to watch for the first half of the film. This does not go without saying that by the end I liked Stuart Long's character in the film, but I couldn't like him for the first ...

Mark Wahlberg is competent here as the eponymous boxer who takes a shine to the young church-going Carmen (Teresa Ruiz). He can't get near her, so he somewhat opportunistically decides to join her church and see if that helps. Thing is, pretty quickly he discovers that there is something to this "God" thing, and decides to try and get himself ordained for the priesthood - leaving all thoughts of the girl behind. Meantime, he discovers that he is suffering from a degenerative disease that will prove debilitating as he ages. It's one of those inspirational stories this, but I just didn't particularly like or empathise with "Stu". I found his profound and fairly sudden Damascine conversion hardly explained in the context of the film and except...