Could have been a good movie, but they completely screwed it up.

Rating: 1/10 (26 January 2017)

I saw this movie because I saw Liam Neeson promoting it on TV. Let me just say upfront that if you like Liam Neeson you will be severely disappointed because he is only in the movie for 10 minutes.
Anyway, the movie is about Catholicism in Feudal Japan, which needed more exposition in the media to be sure. The Japanese themselves somewhat admitted that Christians got a raw deal in Japan in the Anime Samurai Champloo, and I liked Tom Cruise's The Last Samurai movie as well, though, in retrospect this may have colored my expectations for this film.
The plot of the movie involves two priests who go to Japan to investigate claims made by the Japanese that a priest (Liam Neeson) renounced his faith and integrated into Japanese society. The priests meet a Japanese guy in Macau who is to be their guide and later a huge annoyance throughout the rest of the film.
The priests arrive in Japan and immediately forget about looking for Liam Neeson's character and start hearing confessions and doing priest stuff for the remaining Japanese Christians they find there. This goes on for almost an hour of the movie until they are inevitably caught by Japanese samurai who do not want Catholicism in their land resulting in the torturous deaths of many Japanese Christians who refuse to step on a picture of Jesus and one of the priests. The samurai sit the remaining priest down and try to explain to him why he shouldn't be spreading unwelcome foreign religions in their land and that if he apostatizes the carnage will stop, but the priest doubles down on his self-righteousness until the remaining Japanese Christians are tortured and Liam Neeson shows up to call the priest out on his self-righteous crusade. This apparently is still not enough, as Jesus also needs to tell the priest to step on his picture. I get that this is supposed to be inspirational for Christians, but the next part would anger and disappoint me if I were still a Christian.
After the priest apostatizes, he and Liam Neeson's character are seen helping the samurai catch the remaining Japanese Christians by inspecting their belongings for Christian symbols. Then the movie fast forwards and Liam Neeson's character dies, followed soon after by the younger priest.
The movie could have been watchable if they had more Liam Neeson and treated Japanese culture as something other than a curse that you put upon yourself to avoid torture and death.