124 min | R | April 13, 2022 | Columbia Pictures
A foul-mouthed boxer survives a near-fatal crash and decides to become a Catholic priest. Mark Wahlberg punches and prays his way through a real-life conversion story. The faith is sincere. The movie around it is not.
Stuart Long is an amateur boxer turned aspiring actor who survives a motorcycle crash and decides to become a Catholic priest. The film tracks his conversion from a foul-mouthed brawler into a man of faith dying of a degenerative muscle disease. Rosalind Ross builds the movie around the idea that a sinner makes the best believer because he knows exactly what he is being saved from. The story wants to be both a gritty underdog drama and a sincere testament to grace. It never decides which one it is, so it delivers neither at full strength.
Mark Wahlberg plays Stu with the same swagger he brings to every role. He sells the early scenes as a cocky meathead working a deli counter and chasing a Sunday school teacher into church. He is less convincing once Stu finds God. Wahlberg shouts his way through the spiritual awakening and mistakes volume for transformation. Mel Gibson plays Bill Long, the absent drunk father, and his weathered contempt gives the film its few jolts of real friction. Jacki Weaver plays Kathleen, the mother, and she finds the grief that Wahlberg keeps reaching for and missing. Teresa Ruiz plays Carmen with more conviction than the script earns her.
Ross writes and directs her first feature, and the seams show. The screenplay lurches from crude comedy to deathbed sentiment without building the connective tissue that would make the turn land. The cinematography stays flat and functional, lighting the seminary and the hospital rooms with the same dull television glow. The score swells on cue to tell the audience when to feel something, which only underlines how little the scenes generate on their own. Ross stages Stu’s physical decline with restraint, and those late images of a body failing are the only moments where the filmmaking trusts the material.
The film treats faith as a subject to be respected rather than dramatized. It admires Stu without ever making his belief feel earned or specific. The redemption arrives because the structure demands it, not because the man on screen changes in any way the audience can track. There is a hard, strange story buried here about a violent man who finds meaning while his body betrays him. Ross softens every edge that might have made it cut.