Guardian Review of the Passion of the Christ

I obviously spoke too soon earlier. Peter Bradshaw's review of The Passion of the Christ is published in this morning's Guardian and he does not have a good thing to say about it:

The Passion of the Christ
Peter Bradshaw

It's certainly ambitious and technically proficient, but only very moderately acted and turns out to be an incredibly obtuse piece of macho-masochism, overlooking Jesus's message of love and his human complexity in favour of a bizarre make-up bloodbath, turning his body into a gory lattice of latex weals, cosmetic stripes and prosthetic wounds which proclaim their lurid and ridiculous fakeness to the very heavens . . . .

. . . . . Gibson also has ridiculous devils and Satanic apparitions popping up all over the place, whose appearance he has plagiarised from The Omen and Don't Look Now. Is it too much to ask where the spiritual dimension has disappeared to? Where is the message of love, and hope? Where is the compelling poetry of moral grace? Does all of it have to be swept away in a tsunami of fake gore?

Gibson offers brief flashbacks to episodes like the Sermon on the Mount and the Last Supper, hinting in the most superficial way possible at what it has all been about in the first place - before we smartly return to Jesus's ongoing steak tartare nightmare, whose horror is repeatedly undermined with cutaway reaction shots of Mary (Maja Morgenstern) and Mary Magdalene (Monica Bellucci) doing their unvarying sorrow ing face to the accompaniment of syrupy-sad music.

But it seems to me that Bradshaw has missed the point of the flashbacks to episodes like the Last Supper and the Sermon on the Mount, which are to drive home repeatedly the very message Bradshaw does not find in the film, love of enemies, prayer for persecutors, laying down one's life for one's friends, forgiveness. The juxtaposition of this specifically chosen teaching with Jesus' own attitude to his suffering is one of the film's most memorable themes.