Whatever you thought of Mel Gibson's pathologically brutal The Passion of the Christ, at least it had a point of view. This plodding, often banal film about the life of Jesus Christ seems more like a Sunday School teaching aid than an intelligent attempt to grapple anew with the famous story.
It has attracted the ire of many Christians for gratuitous tampering with the Gospels, though their reliability as, er, gospel is at least open to challenge. It certainly got me offside in the opening seconds by mangling the opening stanzas of John which, in the Authorised Version, is among the great monuments of English prose.
The film has been edited down from the 10-hour television miniseries The Bible. Some additional material was shot and scenes involving Satan were cut after complaints about his resemblance to Barack Obama. What's left falls into two halves: Jesus' greatest hits followed by a bloody blow-by-blow retelling of the Passion.
Some really odd stuff is included (the dream of Pilate's wife), added (a planning meeting between Caiaphas and Judas), passed over (Jesus' baptism is a brief flashback after John the Baptist's murder) and left out. Meanwhile, a matinee idol Jesus (the lanky Portuguese Morgado, a blond Barry Gibb-lookalike) reels off miracles like party tricks. Crucially, in the last hour, he seems faintly demented, devoid of nobility or gravitas.
To its credit, the film gives a good sense both of the fraught political context and of Jesus' naivete in ignoring it (his "render to Caesar" speech recalls an evasive politician on the hustings) but there are just too many cringeworthy moments ("Thomas! Stop doubting!"). It's King of Kings for people with short attention spans, too stiff and serious-minded to warrant consideration as cinema.
