07/08/10 - Gone with the Pope

Gone with the Pope (2010, 83 min)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1617250/

I go to another Weird Wednesday and the selection this week has a deceiving date. Released in 2010, this is because the film was shot and made way back in the 1970s but just never got done because of financial problems. Eventually found and placed together through random notes, this is probably one of its first screenings ever.

The film follows Paul (Duke Mitchell, also the director and producer) who goes to the Vatican on a mission: capture and hold ransom the Pope. The Pope is played by Lorenzo Dardado.

The movie here is extremely random. For a movie about the above, this plot really isn't introduced until probably forty or more minutes into the film. This leaves surprisingly little time to actually do this Pope capturing, so it makes this entire segment of the movie seem really rushed. A pathetic plan is hatched to kidnap the Pope but it somehow ends up working to perfection. The group then begin to head back to America with the Pope aboard their ship. The film actually has some interesting spots here. The Pope converses with the other two lesser figures under Paul's orders and slowly converts them to religion and convinces them of their wrongdoing. Perhaps the best scene in the whole movie is during this segment where Mitchell actually does a little bit of acting as Paul. He emotionally gives a monologue which ends up being not all that bad. I mean, it's no Patton speech or anything, but the guy does a surprisingly good job compared to the junk that had been passed off as decent acting up until this point.

For most of the movies, I look to see if it looks like the group at least had fun making the film. I don't really even get that vibe here. I instead just see a group of people making a film and not much else. There's no real chemistry anywhere, there's no cohesion to a single scene. And this brings me to a unique condition that Gone with the Pope holds: any single scene can be removed from the movie and it still remain the same movie. This is bizarrely true. Even the scene that gives the entire plot of the movie is done so randomly and poorly that it can be figured out from other clues and later stuff. No scene stands out as important, but rather they all stand at the exact same level of mediocrity.

Overall, I gave this film a 2/10. It scrapes by with a 2/10 because it at least looks good at times. Some establishing shots are decently done and that one Paul monologue is pretty cool. Other than that, though, the film doesn't have much.