Padre Pio

Despite the historical events and perhaps leading characters personal dark and heavy route towards becoming who he was that does not mean they film needs to also be so dark.

It seems that lately films are more and more separated into fluff and pop corn blockbusters and then you have these heavy "artistic" or religious or quasi intellectual films where they examine certain characters or events. So that after the viewers and producers can pat each other on the back how smart and deep their introspection is.

While not too long ago, directors knew how to interweave complex, dark or troublesome events with light, with entertainment , with charismatic characters to offput that or moments to balance it out. Intellectual and dark doesnt mean it needs to be heavy and difficult to watch.

Very very few know how to do this nowadays, Lebeoufs films never do. They are just plain dark and uncomfortable to watch. Especially ones like this, where they (unfortunately only) focus on the most heavy part of his journey to becoming Padre Pio everyone knows.

You will leave the theater still knowing nothing about Padre Pio. I think for a good actor like Shia Labeouf, it is a shame he was not given a better script and movie to be in. The problem with this is not the actors and actresses. It is this erroneously titled movie that should've been called "Communism-Lite Enters Italy and Padre Pio is Off in a Friary Somewhere." It is pretty much false advertising to title a film about a character who is in maybe 30% of the movie and has little to do with the rest of the story. Titling it "Padre Pio" would seemingly indicate biopic, but instead we are spending much of the movie with these other characters and political issues that seem like an underhanded push/propaganda for the director and writers' politics. It's like they used Padre Pio's name to attract an audience to watch another movie. I don't know if they did not have the budget to do a real movie about him, but feeling like a gypsy switch just took place when I'm staring at what feels like thinly disguised propaganda was something else. You will feel like you watched two short pieces that have been meshed together. This movie is an hour and forty-four minutes, so it doesn't have time for much. You will still feel empty as it goes into low-budget film school "trying to be arty" with handheld, grainy shots that linger on the same thing for far too long - almost as if they are deliberately stretching out a runtime. Right from the beginning with an overcast sky & sun, we get two exceedingly long shots of this. The second time around I was going "Okay, we got it. The sun is behind the clouds." Other shots that do not work were the spinning of the camera around a bell tower rope being pulled and the handheld closeups of a crucifix. It's a short feature already yet has filler disguised as supposedly interesting cinematography. I don't know, but I was like "Dude, I would've left that one out." I also think for fans of Padre Pio some of this probably comes across as pretty offensive. I don't know if Padre Pio flew off the handle in profanity spewing fits of rage at people, but he's certainly doing that in this movie.

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.

Such a disappointment. Literally 20 minutes of the film contains Padre Pio. This movie focuses on political issues in Italy rather than Padre Pio. The film was boring & lacked any points of interest. Crew had no idea the talent in Shia LeBouf, who did a phenomenal job as Padre Pio. He wasn't given anywhere near enough screen time or enough opportunity to portray Padre Pio. Nudity in a film about the greatest saint of our time is so sacreligious & disrespectful to the man that is Padre Pio as well as his religion. This is an injustice to Padre Pio & such a bust. LeBouf was phenomenal, storyline was awful.

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.