Starring: Jim Caviezel, Monica Bellucci, Maia Morgenstern, Hristo Jivkov
Director: Mel Gibson
Category: III
By sheer weight of media coverage, Mel Gibson's production has become the film everyone simply has to see. Whether this was by accident or design is debatable. What's beyond doubt is that you go into the cinema with a few things on your mind.
What this takes away from the experience, of course, is our judgment of the whole affair as a film. We're too busy checking our reaction to all the things we've gone in expecting to see. Maybe that was Gibson's plan all along. Despite professing that he wanted to simply make a film that portrays the story of the last 12 hours in the life of Jesus of Nazareth, as he believed it to be, there are far too many factors here that take your mind away from the story itself. Maybe all he wants is for people to 'react'.
Chief among the elements that will grab your attention is the gore. A more brutal film you're never likely to see. When, for instance, Jesus is lashed by Roman guards, his flesh isn't simply marked, it's torn from his torso in shreds. And this goes on and on, relentlessly. Similarly, his journey carrying the cross on which he is to be crucified takes the audience through a harrowing, repetitive series of stumbles, blows, lashings - through torture itself.