Two 17th-century Portuguese missionaries, Father Sebastian Rodrigues (Andrew Garfield) and Father Francisco Garupe (Adam Driver), embark on a perilous journey to Japan to find their missing mentor (Liam Neeson).

While there, the two men minister to the Christian villagers who worship in secret. If caught by feudal lords or ruling samurai, they must renounce their faith or face a prolonged and agonizing death.

Review

“The Chairman” – Mark this day in history, a bad Scorsese film! I had so much hope for “Silence” before walking into the screening, the trailers told an interesting story of the Catholic movement in Japan and the push back it received which resulted in the purging of the church from the country. Now take all those elements, add Scorsese at the helm with a very good cast and you ask you yourself “who could this be bad?”, well it is and uncomfortably so. The movie is bloated and long winded, the runtime is two hours but it felt more like three hour ‘bore-fest’.

Scorsese makes too many assumptions and leaps of faith about the lead here, played by Andrew Garfield (Father Sebastian Rodrigues). So much so that I just let out a groan at the end of this.

The subject matter itself concerns me as well, as a Christian, this was an extremely biased view of the what you can only imagine as being seen an invasion by an outside force, in this case the Catholic Church. A conflict where a colonizing force see themselves as the victims when they meet with resistance from the local authorities.

Don’t waste your time on this, and if you do Andrew Garfield wasn’t too bad. This movie isn’t divisive, it’s just bad.  2.5/10

Not sure where this movie is getting its rating of 85% on Rotten Tomatoes. #confused

I actually gave myself a chill to think I gave a MARTIN SCORSESE film a failing grade, hopefully he makes a comeback.

Could THE CHAIRMAN be right? A bad film from the “Great One”? Let us have your thoughts.