The Masked Saint is a professional wrestling Christian movie. That first sentence alone should either intrigue you or make you think this movie is going to be ridiculous. As much as I wanted this movie to be intriguing it unfortunately more on the ridiculous side. There are not too many movies about professional wrestling and that is mostly because it is looked down upon as sort of a guilty pleasure. Professional wrestling is a very interesting industry that isn’t understood by majority of the population. The only movie to really get it right and portray it in an honest way in how it mostly exists is the movie The Wrestler starring Mickey Rourke from 2008. Although some retired professional wrestlers took offense to how pathetic Mickey Rourke’s character was made to look The Wrestler was a well made artistic film and a genuine inside look at an industry often ignored by the general public. That is more than I can say for The Masked Saint which is really nothing more than another mediocre Christian movie that doesn’t really showcase the industry of professional wrestling or Christianity in any smart or genuine way at all.
The Masked Saint is about Chris Samuels (Brett Granstaff) who is a retired professional wrestler with a wife named Michelle (Lara Jean Chorostecki) and a daughter named Carrie (T.J. McGibbon). Chris has left his life as a professional wrestler to become a preacher of a run down church in a bad part of a small Michigan town. At first the family is excited to start a new life, but things go wrong when the church loses it’s funding. Chris decides to return to the ring and wrestle to help pay for and keep the church going.
If this movie sounds familiar to you it’s probably because the plot sounds almost exactly like the plot of Nacho Libre (2006) starring Jack Black. The difference between the two films though is that Nacho Libre is a pretty fun silly comedy that works while The Masked Saint is a brutal unsubtle Christian movie with characters that come off almost more ridiculous than any character in Nacho Libre. Granstaff as Chris Samuels for instance just comes off as sort of wooden. They have some good ideas for the character showing his dad leaving home at an early age, but pretty much all of that comes off as just shallow character development that never really works.
The only person I think had a decent performance in the whole movie was the late professional wrestler Roddy Piper playing a sketchy wrestling promoter that Chris works for. Piper’s doesn’t have a huge role which probably helps although he does come off pretty good in the role he is in and doesn’t over do it like a lot of the other actors in the movie. Piper will always be known for being a better professional wrestler than an actor although he did give a pretty damn good performance in John Carpenter’s They Live (1988). It is pretty sad to see his last movie be nothing more than a mediocre Christian movie although I guess the silver lining is that he is the best thing about it.
The biggest problem with The Masked Saint is the fact that nothing about this movie feels real or genuine. The characters which mostly consists of members of the church come off as nothing more than paint by number cartoonish caricatures. One sub-plot consists of the Samuels’ neighbors having domestic violence problems where the husband is beating on the wife. The husband comes off as nothing more than a joke and is a character that seems as if he is just a parody of how a disturbed wife beating husband would act. The whole sub-plot is worked out in the most ridiculous way that could not possibly work in real life. I know the filmmakers wanted to water down these violent aspects so that good little Christian boys and girls could watch the movie, but if they grow up thinking this is how domestic violence works then they are going to grow up extremely ignorant on the important and sometimes overlooked subject of domestic abuse.
The way this movie handles the professional wrestling aspects of the movie are almost just as dumb as how they handle the Christian aspects. I’m still not sure if professional wrestling is suppose to be fixed and predetermined in this movie or not. Even after viewing the entire movie it was just too hard to tell due to the fact that they are never really clear on it. In an actual professional wrestling match in the real world professional wrestlers work together to put on a match and do so after tons of years of learning the extremely athletic and artistic craft. This movie feels as though the filmmakers know nothing about the real industry of professional wrestling which I find extremely disrespectful. If the filmmakers behind The Wrestler (2008) can do the research and make a great well crafted movie there is absolutely no reason that these filmmakers behind The Masked Saint can’t at least get that small aspect right in their little low budget Christian movie.
I read that The Masked Saint won the best picture award at the International Christian Film Festival. If a movie like this is the best Christian movie that Christians can put out then they just need to stop releasing movies altogether. I’m more agnostic than anything else, but I have nothing against the religion of Christianity or any movies put out in the sub-genre known as Christian movies which have become very popular in the past couple of years. All I really ask is that they be artistic and genuine and made with some professionalism which is all I really want from any movie. If I can give this movie any credit at all I can at least say that it is somewhat professionally shot with decent cinematography. Overall though The Masked Saint is annoyingly preachy and almost every line of dialogue feels like getting hit over the head with a giant wooden cross pro-wrestling chair shot style. It is a poor excuse for a motion picture and just fails on almost every level.
Dave’s Rating- ★(1) out of ★★★★★(5)
