Padre Pio

Not sure why it's called Padre pio, it barely showed him. Even then it showed him in a bad light. Bad music score, camera work, really nothing redeeming about it.

It's like watching a really bad movie with a fee clips of a worse movie popping it.

Why not make a movie that actually shows him, the stigmata, lines of people coming to confess to him, his ability to read what was bothering people at confessions.

Why put in the nudity and profanity? Why use his name to promote this boring garbage.

We thought it would be good after hearing about LaBeouf converting it would be good. It's not remotely that.

The town parts, which is most of the movie, were just awful. Broken English, heavy accented English from everyone. Why not have them speaking Italian? It would have made it a lot better

But maybe only one star better. The town dialogue was boring and uninteresting and far from the way a regular person would speak. I did not care about any of the townspeople, they all could have died and I would have been happy to get back to the scenes of Pio which is the movie's topic.

I gave a star for Shia's performance as Padre Pio. Again the writing isn't there for it to be one of his best performances or anything, but it was the only enjoyable part of the movie.

I have a crazy idea why not put more Padre Pio scenes in a film about Padre Pio? Maybe they didn't think of that. Whole film could have been in the church instead and it would have been a solid 5/10.

So this has to be by far the most disappointing film I've seen in 2023. Why? I was so looking forward to this film for over a year before its release, expecting some semblance of a Padre Pio biopic. What I got instead? A completely different film whose plot involved the struggle of communists vs fascists in a small provincial Italian town, with Padre Pio being an incidental character who wasn't relevant to the plot AT ALL. In fact, had it not been for the last few seconds of the film's ending where they show him getting the stigmata, Padre Pio could have literally been interchanged with any generic provincial Italian friar. I'd even go a step further: if all his scenes were deleted from the film, it would not have changed the plot in the slightest whit. I would have at least been a bit more forgiving if they had taken 'artistic liberties' with telling Padre Pio's life, as some over-enthusiastic biopics tend to do.... but they didn't even do that! They do not discuss, flesh out, or even relay the tiniest iota of the story of Padre Pio... he is merely an incidental and inconsequential character in a story involving the early struggles of Italian partisans against the nascent fascists. I'm not saying that there is anything inherently wrong with that type of story (though truth be told, even that was bland and uninteresting), but if that was the main point and intent of the film, then the filmmakers should have been up front about it, and shouldn't have duped the audience by disguising this as having anything remotely to do with Padre Pio. Shame, as Padre Pio's story is fascinating on its own, and actually TELLING his story would have been immensely more interesting than this insipid drivel we were given here.

Padre Pio is portrayed as being in a constant state of suffering. The last scene shows the stigmata and the entire movie seems to be leading up to that point. The film's purpose seems to be that the stigmata was real. Knowledge of Padre Pio is required before this movie will make any sense. Keep your finger on the volume dial for the whole movie. The sound is either so quiet that you have to turn it up to 70% and then there are points where it is so loud you have to turn it down to 20%. Most of the plot is boring and the nudity is unnecessary and precludes showing this film to a lot of people. In the movie, Padre Pio is disconnected from other people and I gather this movie will also not connect with many people either. Rent this film but do not buy it. It is an unpleasant, uninspiring movie. It does not draw people to faith.

I was not expecting much reverence for the subject matter in a film by Abel Ferrara, whose latest film was about the Vatican blowing up. Ferrara seems to be his own audience these days.

Nevertheless, Shia Labeouf's publicized conversion to Catholicism did spark some interest (though I thought he already did this for "Fury"). However, my nose was still very well plugged, and it remained so. This is not a biography. It is just empty, with no real direction in story, nor any perceivable goal. The shark in "Jaws" was better utilized than Saint Pio was in this film; at least the shark was central to the plot, and his presence was felt- even when he was offscreen.

Ferrara's other films are brutal, unrelenting, dark and negative, and yet utilize Catholic imagery as little more than window dressing. Such is the case with this film, only its also part of the title. Don't waste your time. Watch "Padre Pio: Miracle Man" or "Padre Pio: Between Heaven and Earth," instead.