Father Joe

The Toronto International Film Festival invented Midnight Madness as a way to roll out the red carpet for genre films and those that aren’t necessarily deemed high art, but have a devoted audience nonetheless. Obsession, for instance, debuted in this section last year and went on to write history as one of the most profitable features ever made. Elsewhere though, the late-night slot rarely bodes well – a point most recently illustrated by Venice’s midnight premiere of Father Joe.

Kiefer Sutherland plays the titular antihero, a priest, whose mission it is to take down Manhattan’s drug dealers, specifically those who have no scruples selling to minors. After he sabotages their operations and burns laboratories, Father Joe injects underbosses and ranking members with a self-made virus. To receive the antidote, they must come to his service each Sunday, where he gives out little pills instead of the Eucharist.

Written by Luc Besson and directed by Barthélémy Grossmann (who previously gave Besson’s Arthur franchise a horror makeover with Arthur Malediction), Father Joe is pure and unadulterated mayhem. The feature milks the absurdity of its central image of a vengeful priest, complete with an array of firearms and hand grenades, without much interest in building the world around it.

Familiar tropes are reproduced in an exaggerated manner, to the point where parts of the film play like a spoof on revenge action flicks à la John Wick. But for all its outrageously bonkers elements, the picture never becomes as entertaining, as fun, as it ought to be.

Grossmann mistakes business for energy, as rapid-fire montages create the illusion of tempo, but feel utterly lifeless underneath. The priest’s attacks quickly grow repetitive and fail to develop, much like the thin plot, which keeps circling back to ideas it already established.

One might be tempted to make a case for its contribution as trash cinema, but a storyline involving a 15-year-old addict demands a level of seriousness the feature has not prepared one for. Ever Anderson plays the surly teenager, oscillating between the likeness of her mother (Milla Jovovich) and that of fellow nepo baby Margaret Qualley.

Al Pacino was cast as the crime syndicate’s kingpin but the screen legend phoned in his performance, with none of his familiar spark to be found. Sutherland at least commits to the folly, bringing a straight-faced intensity to Father Joe, making his performance one of the more engaging aspects.

Screening Father Joe at this late hour, it feels almost as if the festival counted on its viewers being too exhausted to notice just how many things are wrong with it. But anyone who has ever dozed off watching a film can attest to just how annoying an onslaught of blaring sound and a staccato barrage of garish images can be to a tired spectator. Perhaps an audience discovering this potboiler on a streaming service, with little time or money at stake and the luxury of abandoning it at any point, can be more forgiving, but screening this at one of the most prestigious festivals feels hard to justify.

Selina Sondermann

Read more reviews from our Venice Film Festival 2026 coverage here.

For further information about the event visit the Venice Film Festival website here.