Luc Besson has spent decades turning recognisable actors into action heroes from the writer-producer’s chair, the factory that gave the world Taxi and The Transporter. His latest product casts Kiefer Sutherland as a parish priest who fights the Little Italy mob with bullets rather than sermons, and sets him against Al Pacino as the drug lord whose business he is wrecking. That festival oddity now has a route into American multiplexes.

As Deadline first reported, Vertical has acquired North American rights to Father Joe, the action-thriller directed by Barthélémy Grossmann from Besson’s screenplay, and is planning a wide theatrical release. The distributor struck the deal with Brieuc Jonnet of EuropaCorp, Grégoire Melin of world sales company Kinology and CAA Media Finance on behalf of the filmmakers. Ever Anderson and Michael Rispoli complete the lead cast.

The setup is pure genre. In early-1990s Manhattan, Sutherland’s Father Joe wages what the festival synopsis calls a secret war on the neighbourhood’s crime rings, “turning the city’s underworld into his congregation.” Cineuropa’s review fills in the backstory: a Vietnam veteran who lost his daughter to drugs, now running the parish of St Felicity with altar boys who double as trained killers. Pacino plays Giu, a cultured kingpin who reads Dante and, in the review’s telling, is furious when the priest’s crew forces his network to stop selling to kids.

The casting is the hook Vertical is buying. Pacino, whose screen legend was built on The Godfather and Scarface, here sits on the other side of the confessional, after playing an exorcist priest himself in last year’s The Ritual. Sutherland, still best known for 24, is also credited as a producer. Anderson, cast as a former addict the priest takes under his protection, is the daughter of Milla Jovovich, star of Besson’s The Fifth Element, and played Wendy in Disney’s Peter Pan & Wendy.

Critics on the Lido were split. Screen Daily called it a “knowingly trashy” action thriller to which Pacino adds marquee heft, and TheWrap found the mob drama scattershot, while Cineuropa praised Grossmann’s knack for staging action without losing sight of his characters.

Father Joe screened out of competition at the 83rd Venice Film Festival in September, where Eagle Pictures was listed as its Italian distributor. Vertical is targeting a 2027 release in North America; it has not announced a date.

The festival logline closes on an ultimatum: “Confess, repent, pay, or face the consequences.” Vertical is now betting that American audiences will pay, and Cineuropa signed off its review by noting that, given the long lives of Taxi and The Transporter, this may not be the last we see of Father Joe.

Tags: Al Pacino, festival-deal, Luc Besson, Kiefer Sutherland, Father Joe, Vertical