The Confessor Movie Review

I take no price in having sat through the entirety of The Confessor, but Stephen Rea's third billing convinced me that it might be worth my trouble. (Molly Parker isn't bad either, and even headliner Christian Slater has done some solid work -- just none of it in recent years.)

This film by aspiring assistant director/producer Lewin Webb is straight out of episodic TV. Think your lesser episode of, oh, Law & Order. A priest (Von Flores) is discovered red-handed with one of his flock, dead and covered with blood. The priest says he was just giving him the last rites, and that he knows what happened, but he can't divulge this due to confession's rules of confidentiality. Immediately on the case is Daniel Clemens (Slater), who's better known for his fundraising abilities and PR schmoozing. What he uncovers is a sort-of half-baked counterculture of gay Catholics (of which Flores may or may not have been a member)... and a murder plot that has absolutely nothing to do with any of that.

Whazzat? The Confessor would love to be a murder mystery wrapped up in the mysticism and oppresive, military-life ranksmanship of the Catholic Church, but ultimately the church stuff is little more than a backdrop for a run-of-the-mill whodunit. The movie is all but done in by a staggering one-two punch of awfulness. First is the script, which is loaded with cliched and just plain bad dialogue, the kind of stuff that went out of fashion in the last days of C-grade noir. Making matters worse is some terrible, terrible acting. Slater is bad here, but he's nothing compared to the cast of unknowns supporting him (I'm talking about 4th billing on down). You couldn't produce worse line readings if you tried to make them sound stilted, like when a good actor is "playing" a bad actor in a film within a film. You know what I'm talking about. No? Never mind, then, and forget you ever heard about The Confessor.

Aka The Good Shepherd.