MAN FROM ROME – Review

If you’re craving a DA VINCI CODE sort of movie but don’t want to concentrate quite that hard, THE MAN FROM ROME may be your answer. The plot, penned by Adrian Bol, Beth Bollinger and Gretchen Cowan, is very Dan Brownian but shorter and with fewer moving pieces and locations. Hunky Richard Armitage stars as a Vatican troubleshooting priest who we quickly understand to be the Church’s go-to guy for dangerous missions. Not so much for gruesome cleanups like Harvey Keitel’s memorable Mr. Wolf, in PULP FICTION but where there’s a problem, Armitage’s Father Quart is reliable for a solution. The film opens with his being bummed about someone he was unable to protect on a recent job. Not his fault but guilt lingers, regardless.

Switch to the Vatican’s computer center. The Pope’s (Franco Nero) computer is being hacked by an unknown tech whiz who can breeze through a lot of firewalls. The goal is to get his attention and ask him to prevent a beautiful old church in Seville, Spain, from being demolished to make room for a massive new real estate development. The driving force behind the construction is a sleazy banker (Rodolfo Sancho) who has compromised other interested parties with a panoply of dirty tactics. His almost ex-wife (the gorgeous Amaia Salamanca) is the hereditary owner of the land and his most ardent opponent, dedicated to maintaining their legacy.

Sancho’s methods of pushing the deal include blackmail, bribery and possibly a murder or two. Armitage is sent there to protect the image of the Church, which already has more than enough scandals, and to check out the deaths, and then advise on whether keeping the lovely old church is worth more than the whopping payday the sale would yield.

There’s considerable suspense in to what lengths the developers will go to, and how Armitage will handle them, including several physical exchanges. The bad guys have moles within the local police and Vatican inner circle, leaving our hero with few allies he can trust in the face of danger. The greed and corruption story plays out efficiently under the direction of Sergio Dow in a relatively low budget version of Tom Hanks’ similar sojourns based on Brown’s novels. The institution isn’t painted as evil but that’s not the same as finding some of its leaders more human than humane, and much less holy.

Though unrated at the time of this review, expect a film that would fall somewhere between a hard PG-13 and a soft R. A fair portion of the audience will be glad that Armitage has shirtless moments; a comparable number will be bummed that Salamanca doesn’t. There’s not nearly enough mayhem to call this a guy flick but there’s a sufficient amount of action to keep the adrenaline flowing as events unfold.

MAN FROM ROME, in English and Italian with English subtitles, opens in theaters and streaming on demand on Friday, June 30.

RATING: 3 out of 4 stars