Cinema review: The Passion of the Christ (18)

6:44pm Monday 15th March 2004

If Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ wasn't about the defining event in a major world religion it would be easy to dismiss it as unsubtle rubbish. There's not much entertainment here.

Stylistically, it's full of bad touches. The portentous Middle Eastern music does not let up for the whole film and neither do the slow-motion scenes.

The violence is severe, but no worse than in Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill, which was a critics' favourite.

And the gory scenes are interspersed with cheesy flashbacks: Jesus as a carpenter joking with Mary as he makes a table; Jesus baking bread; Jesus teaching the disciples. The scenes are all bathed in a golden light.

But aside from a few well-known highlights, few of Jesus's thought-provoking words are featured.

The film, in Latin and Aramaic with subtitles, starts with Jesus's arrest after his betrayal by Judas, but his suffering really begins about a third of the way through when he is flogged to a bloody pulp by Roman soldiers.

The next scene - Jesus's tortured march to Golgotha to be crucified - lasts about 20 minutes. You lose count of the number of times Jesus pitches forward (in slow motion) under the weight of the cross.

With such a build-up, the Crucifixion itself is bound to be a gory affair. Blood duly spurts (in slow motion) as the nails go in.

But is it, as many have claimed, an anti-Semitic film? It is set in Israel and the priests who resent Jesus are Jewish. They are the film's bad guys. They pressurize Roman governor Pontius Pilate to have Jesus crucified. When he dies, their temple is wrecked by an earthquake.

But it's not just the priests who give Jesus a hard time. It is the Romans who flog him, who torture him in prison and who crucify him.

And it is a heroic Jew, Simon of Cyrene, who helps Jesus carry the cross and who stops the Roman soldiers from beating him to death.

To take on the Crucifixion is an extraordinarily audacious thing to do. This film has made good money in the US and, were I not reviewing it, I would have been among those paying to see it out of curiosity.

It ends with Jesus's resurrection. But instead of feeling uplifted as you walk out of the cinema, you will probably feel relieved and slightly sick. My honest advice? Read the book instead.

Popcorn rating: two out of five

We asked a rabbi, a Jewish Christian and a pair of Christian clergymen what they thought about this film. Click here, to read their opinions.