Alfonso Pineda Ulloa’s There Are No Saints initially bears the fingerprints of its scriptwriter, Paul Schrader. The film, shot almost a decade ago and presumably only being released now in order to capitalize on Schrader’s renewed prestige, opens with Neto Niente (José María Yazpik), a former hitman known as The Jesuit, being released from death row after an arresting officer admits to planting evidence in the man’s case. Back on the streets of South Texas, Neto simply wants to reconnect with his wife, Nadia (Paz Vega), and young son, Julio (Keidrich Sellati). He also spends ample time stoically brooding in his hotel room and at church about his past sins, which are visualized across grim flashbacks.
Complicating this man’s path to the straight and narrow is that Nadia has a new boyfriend, local criminal kingpin Vincent Rice (Neal McDonough). And when this seething lunatic gets word of a clandestine rendezvous between Neto and Nadia, he promptly kills her, kidnaps Julio, and flees to Mexico. At this point, the film largely zaps the story of any rumination on spiritual struggle and dives headfirst into the tumult of Neto’s quest for revenge. With an eager-to-help stripper, Inez (Shannyn Sossamon), along for the ride, the man bestows a biblical fury upon the scores of gangland associates in his path, and with the kind of ease you’d expect from any number of taciturn action-movie antiheroes.
There Are No Saints is a B movie through and through, and one that’s bolstered by a stalwart supporting cast that includes Tim Roth, Tommy Flanagan, and Ron Perlman as a series of live-wire lowlifes. McDonough, though, is the MVP here, gloriously hamming it up as Vincent, an endless fount of despicable behavior. (The audience is introduced to him as he quite enthusiastically whips a baseball at the groin of a tied-up lackey.) Among these heavies, Yazpik proves to be an effective ass-kicker, stalking through There Are No Saints with an imposing aura while trying to tamp down the newfound warmth rising up within him.
Perhaps inevitable given how long it’s taken for it to reach theatrical release, the film isn’t without moments of unintentionally funny dissonance. In one scene, Neto’s counsellor, Carl Abrahams (Roth), gives him a so-called top-of-the-line cellphone to use, which just turns out to be a long-outdated iPhone. Elsewhere, instances of flat ADR work suggest that entire portions of the film were hastily reassembled in the editing room by various hands trying to pull its ambitions in different directions. This intermittently saddles There Are No Saint with a bizarrely airless quality, though in the case of McDonough’s performance, the disembodied-sounding audio actually makes his character come across much creepier.
Such flaws, though, are part and parcel of a film that intoxicatingly embodies the grungy spirit of classic exploitation cinema. The film opens with a stock bible quote—“The sins of the father shall be visited upon the sons”—and the filmmakers and actors don’t pull any punches in tracing how that portent is realized. By the time Neto reaches the end of his mission and comes face to face with Perlman’s crazed Colonel Kurtz-like cartel figure in an ominous Mexican dungeon, There Are No Saints has already sucked you into its world with a smirking nihilism. And for that, at least, one imagines that Schrader would approve.
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