Hand to God
FATHER STU, BASED ON A TRUE STORY, MAY DELIVER JUST WHAT YOU EXPECT
MOVIE REVIEWS FATHER STU (M)
Director: Rosalind Ross (feature debut)
Starring: Mark Wahlberg, Teresa Ruiz, Mel Gibson, Jacki Weaver
Mark Wahlberg is so very priest to meet you
Right from the start, there is only one of two ways you can possibly go with Father Stu.
You immediately give it the benefit of the doubt. Or you quickly doubt there is any benefit to keep watching.
Before we delve into Father Stu’s plotting, it should be noted that the production is based on a true story so unusual that it just had to be filmed for posterity.
When we first meet Stuart “Stu” Long (Wahlberg), he is a veteran boxer being forcibly transitioned out of the sport.
So he does what any 40-yearold retired middleweight with a prohibitive concussion diagnosis would do: Stu drives all the way to Hollywood so he can become a movie star.
Months later, the only part that Stu has landed is behind a deli counter in an LA supermarket.
It is here he spots Carmen (Teresa Ruiz), a most attractive woman that Stu would like to get to know. Tracking her movements just tastefully enough not to be slapped with a restraining order, Stu discovers Carmen is a devoutly religious woman with high expectations of how a man should behave.
However, while infiltrating Carmen’s congregation to impress her – which surprisingly, kind of works – Stu finds himself starting another relationship.
Against all odds, Stu finds God. Not in the hearty hymn-singing, churchonce-a-week version of getting some religion. Nope. The God that Stu finds would like him to become a priest.
Wahlberg plays Stu like a simpler, but saltier cousin of the bloke he portrayed in those Ted movies. Stu likes to drink. Sometimes a lot. Stu also likes to swear. Always a lot.
Helping us understand how Stu came to be such a calculated combo of contradictions are his divorced maw and paw (in an unusual piece of stunt casting, Stu’s parents are played by Australian duo Mel Gibson and Jacki Weaver).
While Father Stu will predictably push its title character through a number of familiar fishout-of-water scenarios as he trains to become a Catholic priest – yep, with the vow of celibacy and all of that – there is one shock twist to the tale that changes the nature of Stu’s journey from corny to compelling.
Just as he is making solid progress as a potential man of faith, Stu is struck down with a degenerative muscle disease that will eventually leave him totally immobilised.
However, if you think a diagnosis as damning as this is going to stop the irrepressible Stuart Long, you obviously don’t get out to the movies much.
Father Stu is in cinemas now
OPERATION MINCEMEAT (M) General release
This serviceable military thriller chronicles one of the most famous endeavours in the annals of wartime espionage. In 1943, British intelligence came up with an unorthodox plan to trick the Nazis. A soldier’s corpse would wash up on a Spanish beach, carrying documents that would lead the reader to believe the Allies were about to open a new battlefront in Greece.
If the erroneous intel fell into the hands of the Germans, then Allied fortunes in WWII just might take a turn for the better. As weird as the idea reads on paper, the Brits go about enacting the scheme with just the right dashes of sincere patriotism and detached irony. As a movie, it is actually a vaguely enjoyable watch because of the strength of its casting.
Colin Firth and Succession’s Matthew Macfadyen are very much to the fore as two of the chief conspirators, while Johnny Flynn (Emma) steals several scenes as a wry young officer named Ian Fleming (the same Ian Fleming who would create James Bond just over a decade later).
OUR FATHER (M) Now streaming on Netflix
A thoroughly disturbing true-crime doco about a bizarre case that was only resolved in the US a few years ago. In his career prime, Indianapolis doctor Donald Cline enjoyed a nationally respected reputation as a fertility specialist who got results for desparate childless couples.
Just exactly how Cline achieved those results might never have been revealed had a woman named Jacoba Ballard not taken an online DNA test in 2014.
Ballard discovered she had five half-siblings she had never heard of before. Her amateur detective work, that uncovered that the group shared the same father – none other than the reprehensible Dr Cline – discovered worse. Much worse. By waging a relentless campaign to find out what the hell was happening, the admirable Ballard eventually finds proof that Cline used his own samples to secretly father almost 100 offspring of artificially inseminated origin.
Though the doco is produced to mirror aspects of a fictional horror movie, it is really the dogged digital paper chase started by Ballard that truly saddens, maddens and inspires here. Oh, and stick around for how the US court system decided to deal with Cline. You will be saddened and maddened, but in no way inspired by the final verdict.