Parents' Guide to There Are No Saints

This action thriller isn't just totally generic, but it veers into offensive territory with its racial stereotypes and its violence against women and children. There Are No Saints, which was (hard as it is to believe) written by Oscar-nominated screenwriter Paul Schrader, was actually shot in 2012 and has been sitting on the shelf ever since, despite an endorsement by Schrader himself, who apparently wanted to write a simple exploitation movie. It's hard to say what might have happened to the movie since then, but the 2022 release is very hard to take, especially in a post-George Floyd, post-#MeToo world. The material is primitive -- and taken so seriously that it's impossible to see it as anything other than revolting.

And it's hardly entertaining in any case. Neto is meant to be some kind of vengeance-fueled action hero (the film's original title was The Jesuit), but his character flatlines early; he has no arc and very little personality. Sossamon's Inez is a laughable love interest for him, a "stripper with a heart of gold" who falls so hard that she walks into the lion's den for him. (At least character actors like Tim Roth, Brian Cox, and Ron Perlman inject some life into their brief scenes.) Meanwhile, the action sequences are twitchy and hard to follow, and even surveillance camera footage seems to be handheld for some reason. The real puzzler is trying to grasp how There Are No Saints could have come from Schrader, but there's no question that it belongs at the bottom of his filmography.